Stories from Slatehttp://www.slate.com/all.fulltext.adam_kirsch.rss
Stories from SlateWhat Can Artists Do to Oppose Trump?http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2016/12/what_can_artists_do_to_oppose_donald_trump.html
<p>When Vice President–elect Mike Pence went to see <em>Hamilton</em> on Broadway, he was doing more than enjoying a night at the theater. Even if he didn’t realize it, he was there to<strong> </strong>triumph over an enemy. For if any work of art represented the liberal hope of the Obama years, it was surely <em>Hamilton</em>. Here was a patriotic attempt to open the canon of American history to people of color, to tell the stories of the past in the language of the present, in much the same way that Obama himself believed he could do when he was elected in 2008. The election of Donald Trump eight years later, riding a wave of white supremacy and xenophobia, represented the defeat—for now, at least—of that inclusive hope. &shy;<em>Hamilton</em> and Trump represent diametrically opposed visions of what America is and should be, and Trump won; no wonder Pence, venturing into the sanctum sanctorum of Obama’s America, got booed. Booing was all that the audience could do, having lost when it mattered.</p>
<p>The Trump victory has already put a number of complacent American assumptions to the test. Many things that liberal, educated people believed were cherished by all Americans turned out to be a matter of indifference to almost half of them: a free, objective press; respect for women; respect for the Constitution; common decency. One illusion that will be particularly painful to part with is the idea that high culture and the arts have any effective power in American life.</p>
<p>Maybe they never did. But there was a long moment, roughly coinciding with the Cold War, when circumstances conspired to make it feel like culture mattered. In that post-radio, pre-internet age, the mass media were limited in number—three TV networks, two newsmagazines—and very broad in scope, reaching tens of millions of people. As the recent documentary <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013W7LS44/?tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Best of Enemies</em></a> reminded us, debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal were considered TV events in the 1960s. Talk show hosts welcomed Norman Mailer and Lillian Hellman to their couches. When a poet or essayist made the cover of <em>Time</em> magazine—as James Baldwin did in 1963 and Robert Lowell did in 1967—there was an implication that knowledge of literature and the arts was a central part of being an informed citizen, even if a majority of readers never sought out their work.</p>
<p>But it has been a long time since artists and writers commanded so much public attention.<strong> </strong>During the 2016 campaign, a long list of prominent writers, including Junot D&iacute;az, Amy Tan, and Dave Eggers,<strong> </strong><a href="http://lithub.com/an-open-letter-to-the-american-people/">signed</a> an “Open Letter to the American People” imploring them not to vote for Trump. There were entire gallery <a href="http://chicago.carpediem.cd/events/1292917-dumping-trump-art-against-the-donald-at-elephant-room-gallery-at-c-c-s-art-garage/">exhibitions</a> devoted to protest art against Trump. But the response from outside the “coastal elite” was mostly silence. The emperor of culture turned out to have no clothes. This shouldn’t be unduly embarrassing, given that every institution in American society that opposed Trump—from schools to unions to churches to Fortune 500 corporations—proved unable to exercise the moral power they believed themselves to possess. The arts and humanities stood exposed as what perhaps they always were—the pursuit of a small minority.</p>
<p>It is this revelation of powerlessness, I think, that accounts for the mood of <a href="http://deadline.com/2016/11/hollywood-reacts-to-spectre-of-trump-victory-with-shock-and-disbelief-1201851352/">depression and shock</a> that has gripped the world of the arts since Nov. 8. There is an echo here of intellectuals’ reaction to the defeat of Adlai Stevenson, the liberal “egghead” candidate, in 1952. (Intellectuals, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=42rXlylKrJoC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=the+age+of+american+unreason&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjmisHm5dPQAhXISyYKHdaID2IQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&amp;q=on%20the%20run%20in%20american%20society&amp;f=false">declared</a> in <em>Partisan Review</em> after Stevenson lost, were now “on the run in American society.”)<strong> </strong>Now as then, writers and artists, and people who take their moral and intellectual bearings from literature and art, must reconcile themselves to a world in which they have no connection with power. And not just political power—no one ever thought that there was a Culture Lobby on a par with, say, the National Rifle Association.</p>
<p>What’s more important is that high culture has forfeited the power to define the individual’s reality. The central role that writers and artists have played in public debate and popular culture is a thing of the past, but that role was always secondary to their real purpose, which is to create works that help readers and viewers to shape their lives. Art is supposed to be a tool for<strong> </strong>interpreting our experience and determining our values. And yet such a statement can seem impossibly abstract and idealistic at a time when the nation itself is in danger. One of the definitions of a time of political crisis is that the public usurps the private; it becomes impossible to control what we think about, what dominates our minds and emotions. At such times, in the words of Bertolt Brecht’s poem “To Those Who Come After,” “a conversation about trees is almost a crime.” What are the arts to do, what are people involved with the arts to do, in such a period?</p>
<p>The first lesson we must learn is that it was our prior sense of normality that was the illusion, not our new sense of disaster. The world is always on fire; ask the people of Aleppo whether 2015 was a better year than 2016, the year we all complain about on Facebook because Leonard Cohen and Prince died in it. A bad historical moment, for any of us, is merely one in which the fire gets close enough that we can feel its heat. Now that we are feeling the heat, questioning whether democracy and the rule of law will survive in America, we may lose the durable illusion of “American innocence” that was supposed to have been shed after 9/11 but apparently grew back pretty quickly.</p>
<p>The second lesson we will have to learn is the courage to insist on a private definition of reality, in the face of the overwhelming pressure of public events. If we continue to believe that the arts and culture matter, it will not be because we think a passionate poem or a rousing play has the power to change the world. They don’t: As the poet W.H. Auden said long ago, during a previous era of crisis, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”</p>
<p>This is a bitter truth for many good people, who find it hard to accept that the beautiful and the good are separate ideas, who want their passion for the beautiful to substitute as, or supplement, a passion for the good. If we are to oppose Trump and the policies and crimes that are likely to emerge from his administration, we will have to do so as citizens, not as artists. History shows that the attempt to make art serve a direct political purpose mostly results in bad art and empty self-congratulation. Even the rare works that do have a political effect in their day—such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0486440281/?tag=slatmaga-20">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</a></em>, which was said to contribute to the coming of the Civil War—usually lose their power and interest when that moment is past. In the 1930s, when the world was in worse shape than it is today, artists and intellectuals felt an all-consuming pressure to make their work serve the cause of progress—which meant, usually, the cause of the left, of communism and socialism. The result, at its very best, were works like Carl Sandburg’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0156716658/?tag=slatmaga-20">The People, Yes</a></em> and John Steinbeck’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143039431/?tag=slatmaga-20">The Grapes of Wrath</a></em>, both about the perseverance of the American spirit during the Great Depression—and both unimpeachably democratic, but also simplistic, monochromatic, manipulative. Such books offered propaganda for the common man, in a way not too far removed from Soviet socialist realism. It took a determined critic like Lionel Trilling to defend the cause of ambiguity and complexity at such a moment, to insist that political effectiveness is not the only criterion of artistic value. “It is as if wit, and flexibility of mind, and perception, and knowledge were to be equated with aristocracy and political reaction, while dullness and stupidity must naturally suggest a virtuous democracy,” Trilling complained in a 1946 essay.</p>
<p>This doesn’t mean that art can’t address politics—it can and must. But art works most productively at the point where politics becomes a personal, even private experience. Art speaks most honestly and effectively of the plight of the individual at the mercy of historical events. That is why great political art is so often about the experience of dread and loss, and why it takes such difficult and unpopular forms. Indeed, the political art of the 1930s that remains most vital is often positively hermetic. The early poems of W.H. Auden use cryptic imagery to create a generalized sense of decline and threat; the essays of Walter Benjamin combine cultural criticism with dense Marxist and messianic theory, creating a new way to think about history as a series of endangered moments. Even Picasso’s <em>Guernica</em>, perhaps the most famous work of political art of the past century, is fractured, surreal, bizarre—less a document of an atrocity than a translation of atrocity into the language of modernist painting.<em> </em>But these works live, long after the political climate that produced them has passed, because they are able to make us feel what it was like to be alive in a catastrophic time and place. The function of engaged art is not to change the world but to offer other people, now and in the future, a kind of testimony. Artists are not legislators but witnesses.</p>
<p>The most difficult thing for any human being to accept is powerlessness. It is such a terrifying condition that we will resort to all kinds of magical thinking and conspiratorial fantasy in order to imagine we possess some kind of control over events. But in the words of the poet John Berryman, “We must travel in the direction of our fear.” An embrace of powerlessness may even give art the reckless freedom it needs to become truly subversive and enduring. One of the works I found myself thinking of with the most gratitude in the past few weeks is Tony Kushner’s <em><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/cover_story/2016/06/oral_history_of_tony_kushner_s_play_angels_in_america.html">Angels in America</a></em>, which is above all a play about the imaginative strength of the socially powerless and outcast. The kind of comradeship and utopian hope Kushner writes about, and creates, in that play may be possible only at the margins of society. Power may always remain with the Roy Cohns (not coincidentally, Donald Trump’s mentor); but it is the Louis Ironsons and Prior Walters who we remember with love—not for what they did, but for what they were.</p>Tue, 06 Dec 2016 14:30:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2016/12/what_can_artists_do_to_oppose_donald_trump.htmlAdam Kirsch2016-12-06T14:30:00ZNothing. But that doesn’t mean they should ignore our perilous political present.ArtsArtists Have Never Had Less Power in American Life. What Should They Do in the Age of Trump?100161206005culturedonald trumpAdam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2016/12/what_can_artists_do_to_oppose_donald_trump.htmlfalsefalsefalseArtists have never had less power in America. What should they do in the age of Trump?If we are to oppose Trump, we’ll have to do so as citizens, not as artists.Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Drew Angerer/Getty Images, Nico Beard/Unsplash.Wild and Freehttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/01/the_portable_veblen_by_elizabeth_mckenzie_reviewed.html
<p>No matter how many novels you’ve read, it’s safe to say you’ve never read a novel like <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594206856/?tag=slatmaga-20">The Portable Veblen</a></em>. A story devoted to exposing fraud in the defense procurement industry sounds like one kind of book—perhaps a John Grisham–style legal thriller. A story about dysfunctional families and the poisoned legacies that parents give their children sounds like a totally different genre. But Elizabeth McKenzie puts them together—and then adds a heroine who talks to squirrels, shoutouts to William James and Richard Rorty, and black-and-white photographs inserted into the text in the style of W.G. Sebald. She tells the story in a style so arch and whimsical that it seems almost tongue-in-cheek, yet proves tough enough to handle moments of real trauma and violence.</p>
<p>In titling her novel <em>The Portable Veblen</em>, McKenzie runs the risk that booksellers might shelve it in the wrong section. It sounds like it should be a selection of the writings of Thorstein Veblen, the early-20<sup>th</sup>-century American sociologist who scorned consumerism and invented the term “conspicuous consumption.” In fact, the title refers to Veblen Amundsen-Hovda, a thirtysomething woman who lives in Palo Alto, California. But the connection with Thorstein doesn’t take long to emerge: Veblen was named after the writer and has come to idolize him, even hanging a picture of him in her house.</p>
<p>Veblen strives to live the kind of life her namesake would approve of. “I love Thorstein Veblen because even after an exhaustive survey of his life, he has never let me down,” Veblen writes in a passage set to look like it was produced on her typewriter. “Because he bucked the establishment not only when he was youthful and idealistic, but all his life; because he was so free...” In this spirit, though she resides in the red-hot center of Silicon Valley, Veblen rents a modest old house on the fringes of town, cares nothing for money or status, and is never happier than when communing with trees, streams, and forest creatures.</p>
<p>In particular, she is fond of squirrels, including the one that comes to live in her attic. Not so charmed by the visitor is her fianc&eacute;, Paul Vreeland, a neurologist whom she meets at the hospital where she works as an office temp. It doesn’t take long for the reader to understand that the couple’s opposed feelings about the squirrel—he wants to trap or kill it, she wants to make friends—bespeak a deeper opposition in personality and values that might very well ruin their relationship. For all the drama in <em>The Portable Veblen</em>—and the plot includes mental illness, simulated combat, and high-level government corruption—the real suspense has to do with the fate of Veblen and Paul’s love. “You seem to admire strange and difficult lives more than upright, successful ones,” he tells her, and the question that interests McKenzie is whether it is possible to have both kinds of life.</p>
<p>To make it work, Paul and Veblen will have to overcome not just different attitudes toward success and wealth, but the legacies of two of the most memorably awful families in recent fiction. Veblen was raised by her mother, Melanie, who emerges in McKenzie’s cleverly drawn portrait as a master manipulator. (“It’s the ring of a kept woman,” she spits at her daughter when she first sees her engagement ring.) Full of self-pity, brittle arrogance, and hypochondria—on her first meeting with Paul, she presents him with a typewritten catalog of her symptoms—Melanie is a grotesque. She’s entertaining to read about, but you wouldn’t want to meet her, much less have her as your mother.</p>
<p>Veblen’s tendency to fantasize—McKenzie tells us at perhaps excessive length about the imaginary squirrel-kingdom she invented as a child—is an understandable defense mechanism against such a mother. So is her fear of conflict, her need to smooth things over, her low self-esteem. (She has a tendency to bite her own arm at moments of stress.) The result is a character who is hard to like—harder, perhaps, than McKenzie intends, depending on your tolerance for whimsy.</p>
<p>McKenzie’s prose is complicit in this whimsy: She is fond of odd turns of phrase (“a pair of humble bungalows, each one aplot in lilies” and over-the-top similes (“[it] was a feather in his cap, a long pheasant feather, such as those found on the felted hats of Tyrolean yodelers”). The photographs, too, strike a comic note: Rather than introducing a feeling of mystery, as in Sebald, McKenzie uses them to illustrate utterly commonplace items in the text. (When someone offers Veblen an extra chicken burrito, there is a picture labeled “extra chicken burrito.”)</p>
<p>Yet when Veblen cages the attic squirrel and takes him on a meandering driving trip, all the while holding conversations with him about the meaning of love and happiness, you begin to realize that McKenzie means to blur the boundary between adorable eccentricity and actual madness. With a mother like Melanie and a father like Rudgear—a broken Vietnam vet who lives in an asylum—isn’t Veblen a prime candidate for mental illness? Because Paul and Veblen have rushed into marriage, he is still discovering these icebergs under the surface of her personality—and vice-versa.</p>
<p>For if Veblen suffered from a controlling, intolerant mother, Paul is still angry about the pot-smoking, hippie-commune atmosphere of his own childhood. Things were made worse by a brother, Justin, who is mentally impaired and whose needs dominated the family. All the chaos led Paul to long for bourgeois order and prosperity, which he seems on the verge of attaining. His invention—a device for army medics to perform battlefield brain surgery, which could save many lives—has just been bought by Hutmacher, a medical conglomerate. Paul is placed in charge of the clinical trial, which involves dealing with severely wounded veterans and their deludedly optimistic family members.</p>
<p>At first, it seems like McKenzie has divided the book along traditional lines of genre and gender. Paul’s story focuses on war and business, and exposes the workings of the “real world”—the defense department, big corporations, the media, all of which are shown to thrive on day-to-day compromise and corruption. Veblen, by contrast, is focused on nature, family, and childhood; her concerns have to do with emotion, memory, and relationships. McKenzie writes with equal conviction about both worlds: Scenes set at a defense procurement convention or inside a combat simulator feel as fully imagined as those set in a kitchen or a backyard.</p>
<p>But the real interest of the novel comes from the way McKenzie allows the two realms to infiltrate and comment upon one another. The private, modest Veblen turns out to be the one with a political and philosophical worldview, learned from Thorstein Veblen, about how people ought to live. Paul, on the other hand, is driven to blind and dangerous ambition by unresolved issues in his family and childhood. It’s not until he comes to grips with his past that he is able to act ethically in the world—and the climax of the plot has a perilous ethical test in store. <em>The Portable Veblen </em>brings together its disparate themes and worlds with confidence and dexterity, making the standard well-made novel seem as timid as—well, as a squirrel.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Portable-Veblen-A-Novel/dp/1594206856">The Portable Veblen</a></em> by Elizabeth McKenzie, Penguin Press.</p>
<p><em>See all the pieces in&nbsp;</em><a href="http://www.slate.com/books"><em>this month’s&nbsp;<strong>Slate Book Review</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>Thu, 07 Jan 2016 20:33:40 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/01/the_portable_veblen_by_elizabeth_mckenzie_reviewed.htmlAdam Kirsch2016-01-07T20:33:40ZThis bold new novel about a woman’s relationship with a squirrel blurs the line between eccentricity and madness.ArtsThis Novel About a Woman’s Relationship With a Squirrel Blurs the Line Between Eccentricity and Madness100160107016bookssbr116slate book reviewAdam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/01/the_portable_veblen_by_elizabeth_mckenzie_reviewed.htmlfalsefalsefalseThis novel about a woman’s relationship with a squirrel blurs eccentricity and madness:You’ve never read anything quite like this.Photo illustration by Slate. Image by dossyl/Thinkstock.The book’s heroine is fond of squirrels, including the one that comes to live in her attic.The Poem That Changed the Worldhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/09/stephen_greenblatt_s_the_swerve_did_lucretius_s_poem_really_brin.html
<p>When Stephen Greenblatt, the eminent Renaissance scholar and Harvard professor of English, titled his new book <em><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393064476/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399373&amp;creativeASIN=0393064476">The Swerve</a></u>,</em> it’s a safe bet that he wasn’t thinking about the current slang meaning of the word, which according to Urban Dictionary is “<u><a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=swerve">used most often as a sexual reference</a></u>,” as in “get your swerve on.” The swerve Greenblatt has in mind, rather, is the abrupt, unpredictable movement of atoms that, according to the ancient Roman poet Lucretius, makes possible the creation and destruction of everything in the universe. “The swerve—which Lucretius called <em>declinatio</em>, <em>inclinatio</em>, or <em>clinamen</em>—is only the most minimal of motions,” Greenblatt explains. “But it is enough to set off a ceaseless chain of collisions. Whatever exists in the universe exists because of these random collisions of minute particles.”</p>
<p>There is, however, a nice symmetry between the ancient and current senses of the word. For the universe Lucretius portrays in <em><u><a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html">De rerum natura</a></u></em>, the 7,000-line epic poem that is the main character of Greenblatt’s story, is definitely one that likes to get its swerve on. Or, to use the Roman’s preferred terminology, it is governed by Venus, the goddess of Love. The poem (quoted here in Frank Copley’s translation) begins with a an invocation to Venus:</p>
<blockquote>
For soon as the year has bared her springtime face,
<br /> and bars are down for the breeze of growth and birth,
<br /> in heaven the birds first mark your passage, Lady,
<br /> and you; your power pulses in their hearts …
<br /> in every creature you sink love’s tingling dart,
<br /> luring them lustily to create their kind.
<strong></strong>
</blockquote>
<p>All this makes Lucretius sound like a pious polytheist, about to offer up a hecatomb to the goddess of love. In fact, Greenblatt explains, the core doctrine of <em>De rerum natura</em> is an uncompromising atheism, which understands the gods as nothing more metaphors. While Greenblatt has several stories to tell in <em>The Swerve—</em>there are vibrant descriptions of the lifestyle of ancient Roman aristocrats, the corruption of the medieval Papacy, and the backbiting of Renaissance scholars—his real subject is the intellectual revolution of Epicureanism, the Greek philosophical school to which Lucretius belonged.<strong> </strong>Epicurus, its fourth-century founder, taught that the universe was completely material, made up of nothing but atoms and space. The power that drove life to multiply and evolve was irresistible but blind, the result of purely physical forces. It followed that there was no afterlife, no divine punishment, and no purpose to human existence except the cultivation of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.</p>
<p>For this reason, the word “epicurean” came to mean a seeker of luxury, a sybarite; but in fact, Greenblatt shows, the original Epicureans led a modest lifestyle. Their philosophy was intended not as a license for indulgence but as a therapy for the fear of death. “Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city,” Epicurus said, and this message is at the heart of <em>De rerum natura</em>.</p>
<p>In his remarkably personal introduction, Greenblatt writes that it was this promise of equanimity toward death that first drew him to Lucretius’s poem as an undergraduate, when he picked up a copy for 10 cents in a bargain bin at the Yale Coop. The fear of death, he writes, “dominated my entire childhood,” thanks to “my mother’s absolute certainty that she was destined for an early death.” This fear was, happily, groundless—she lived to be almost 90—but “she had blighted much of her life—and cast a shadow on my own—in the service of her obsessive fear.” Greenblatt was thus a perfect audience for Lucretius’s rationalist message, which he summarizes: “If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence—atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else—your life will change.”</p>
<p><em>The Swerve</em> is powered by Greenblatt’s evangelical enthusiasm for this message. Indeed, he is more interested in explaining Epicureanism, and its intellectual and emotional ramifications, than he is in reading <em>De rerum natura</em>, and the reader learns little about the literary qualities of the poem. It appears in Greenblatt’s story, rather, as a symbolic time capsule, protecting its ancient secular wisdom through the Dark Ages and the Christian Middle Ages—periods Greenblatt depicts in highly conventional terms as poisoned by religion, uniformly grim and ascetic.</p>
<p>When Lucretius was rediscovered—ironically enough, in a monastery library—in 1417, by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini, Greenblatt imagines the moment as the birth of the Renaissance: “There were no heroic gestures, no observers keenly recording the great event for posterity, no signs in heaven or on earth that everything had changed forever. A short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties reached out one day, took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That was all; but it was enough.”</p>
<p>In fact, of course, it was not nearly enough. Greenblatt knows that any such claim for <em>De rerum natura</em> is absurdly overblown—“one poem by itself was certainly not responsible for an entire intellectual, moral, and social transformation,” he grants early on. Yet the subtitle of the book is “How the World Became Modern,” and the implied answer is that it became modern by reading Lucretius and learning to think like him. Greenblatt's brief final chapter, &quot;Afterlives,&quot; does show that <em>De rerum natura </em>influenced on some seminal modern writers, including Montaigne, whose annotated copy of the poem was discovered in 1989. More often, however, what Greenblatt finds is not so much direct influence as a general similarity of outlook—as when he associates Lucretius's materialism with Galileo's, or his rational hedonism with Jefferson's &quot;pursuit of happiness.&quot; To say that &quot;the atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence&quot; seems at best poetic license.</p>
<p>A more important problem with <em>The Swerve</em> is that Greenblatt’s account of Epicureanism makes it sound rather more consoling than it really is. Greenblatt dwells at length on the way Lucretius's thoroughgoing materialism cleanses the human conscience of specters like &quot;religious fanaticism&quot; and &quot;ascetic self-denial&quot; and &quot;dreams of limitless power.&quot; &quot;In short,&quot; he writes, &quot;it became possible—never easy, but possible—in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.&quot; Yet this is not only not easy. The worldview Lucretius proposes—atoms and void and nothing else—is the very one that has driven many other modern writers to despair and rebellion. From Leopardi to Kierkegaard to Camus, modern literature can be seen as a document of what happens when humanity is liberated into a void. It is not nearly as pretty a picture as Greenblatt optimistically suggests.</p>Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:53:50 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/09/stephen_greenblatt_s_the_swerve_did_lucretius_s_poem_really_brin.htmlAdam Kirsch2011-09-29T18:53:50ZStephen Greenblatt thinks he’s found it, but has he?ArtsStephen Greenblatt’s
<em>The Swerve</em>: Did Lucretius’s Poem Really Bring Us Modernity?100110929013Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/09/stephen_greenblatt_s_the_swerve_did_lucretius_s_poem_really_brin.htmlfalsefalsefalse<p>Stephen Greenblatt’s <em>The Swerve</em>: Did Lucretius’s Poem Really Bring Us Modernity?<br>
</p><p>Stephen Greenblatt’s <em>The Swerve</em>: Did Lucretius’s Poem Really Bring Us Modernity?<br>
</p>Titus Lucretius Carus, the Roman poet and philosopher, ca. 99 BC.Ideas Are Viruseshttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/07/ideas_are_viruses.html
<p> Perhaps the most fateful decision in all of European history was made by Augustus Caesar, when he chose to fix the border of the Roman Empire at the Rhine. As a result, the region known to the Romans as Germania would go without the products of Roman civilization—good roads and big cities and the Latin language and Christianity. But it would also remain vigorous and untamed enough to threaten Roman power, and finally destroy it in the fifth century A.D. For the next 1,500 years, the line where Roman writ ended would remain visible on the political and cultural map of Europe. The border between Romance and Germanic languages, between Catholicism and Protestantism, even between the Entente and the Central Powers in the First World War, all shadowed the border between Germania and Rome.</p>
<p>It is no wonder, then, that the sense of being &quot;not-Rome,&quot; for good and ill, did so much to shape modern German identity. But the great irony, as Christopher Krebs shows in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393062651/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399349&amp;creativeASIN=0393062651"><em>A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's </em>Germania<em> From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich</em>,</a> is that it was a Roman who did most to define and crystallize that proud German otherness. Cornelius Tacitus, best known for his grimly disillusioned history of Rome's wicked emperors, was also the author of a short ethnographic treatise on the German tribes, known as the <em>Germania</em>. This book, written in 98 A.D., was almost lost during the Middle Ages. But when it was rediscovered and disseminated in the 15<sup>th</sup> century, just as the Renaissance and Reformation were gathering force, it became something like the bible of German nationalism. </p>
<p>Given where that nationalism led, Krebs is quite justified in the title of his clever, learned new study, which synthesizes a great deal of classical scholarship and intellectual history into a concise, accessible story. To drive the point home, the book opens with a vignette from 1943, when SS troops were dispatched by Heinrich Himmler to a villa in Italy, ordered to retrieve the oldest extant copy of the <em>Germania</em> before it fell into Allied hands. They failed, but the <em>Raiders of the Lost Ark</em>-style mission shows just how much numinous power the Nazis attributed to this ancient book.</p>
<p>And they were not alone. Krebs, a German-born classicist who teaches at Harvard, shows that just about every important German intellectual movement, starting with the Reformation, made a fetish out of the <em>Germania</em>. Based on a simple reading of the text—and Krebs' one failing is that, in concentrating on the <em>Germania</em>'s afterlife, he does not say enough about what it actually contains—this might seem surprising. Tacitus is hardly flattering about either the land or its people. It is &quot;a region hideous and rude, under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold or to cultivate.&quot; The men are undisciplined and lazy, leaving all manual labor to the women, and they drink so much that &quot;if you will but humor their excess in drinking, and supply them with as much as they covet, it will be no less easy to vanquish them by vices than by arms.&quot; </p>
<p>Yet if these are the vices of primitives, the Germans are also credited with the primitive virtues. They are tall, handsome, and vigorous, excellent warriors, jealous of their liberty, and sexually chaste. In short, they are the diametric opposites of the luxurious aristocrats of Rome, who were Tacitus' original readers. The historian turned the Germans into noble savages, just as later European writers would do with the American Indians, in order to reproach the excesses of his own society. As Krebs summarizes, &quot;Freedom, fortitude, morality, and simplicity … could still, it seemed, be found, if not in Rome, at least in <em>Germanien</em>.&quot; </p>
<p>Fifteen hundred years later, when the <em>Germania</em> resurfaced in the library of a German monastery, it was again Romans who were most eager to read it. With a scholar's sense of the drama of bibliophily, Krebs details the quest of the Italian humanists to recover lost and unknown works of antiquity. He thrills to the brief note in the diary of a papal secretary that announces, &quot;Cornelius Tacitus' book on 'the origin and situation of Germany' is found; seen in Rome in 1455.&quot;</p>
<p>But while Italians rediscovered the <em>Germania</em>, Germans made it a Renaissance best-seller. In an intellectual judo-flip, this Roman treatise on German primitivism was taken over by Germans who wanted to assert their historical and moral superiority to Rome. Followers of Martin Luther &quot;produced their own Latin editions, the first German translation, and an extensive commentary&quot; on Tacitus' work. The leading Lutheran Philip Melanchthon hoped the work would help readers &quot;contemplate … the strength and virtuousness of ancient Germany.&quot; </p>
<p>Over the centuries, Krebs shows, certain themes repeated themselves in the way German intellectuals used and misused the <em>Germania</em>. Tacitus speculates that the German tribes were autochthonous—that they sprung from the German soil, and never mixed with any other people. After all, he reasoned, who would voluntarily leave the Mediterranean lands to live in swamps and forests? But German writers chose to ignore the insult; they loved the idea of primeval Germanness, and built towers of fantastic speculation on Tacitus' flimsy foundation. </p>
<p>&quot;Some proposed that German rather than Hebrew was the primary language and that 'Adam was a German man.' &quot; Others, noting that the Jews had borrowed the name of one of Noah's great-grandsons, Ashkenaz, to refer to Germany, suggested that this Ashkenaz was the founder of the German tribes, and that his name was a corruption of Tuisco, the god worshipped by Tacitus' Germans. When Justus M&ouml;ser, the 18<sup>th</sup>-century writer-statesman, wanted to emphasize that the ancient German constitution was democratic, he turned to Tacitus' account of popular assemblies. Did Tacitus also say that the Germans were poor farmers? Never mind, Moser replied—here, the Roman was simply misreading the evidence. </p>
<p>In this way, Krebs shows, the <em>Germania</em> could be made to say just about anything an interpreter wanted. But the most fateful misreading of Tacitus emerged in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, with the rise of &quot;scientific&quot; racism. Now the proposition that the ancient Germans were an autochthonous people blended into the idea that they were an unmixed race, of pure Aryan stock, blessed with the long skulls that quack phrenology made the index of all virtue. </p>
<p>From there it was a short step to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, by which the Nazis banned marriage between Germans and Jews. &quot;Ideologically aligned readers of the <em>Germania </em>considered the laws … as the 'most recent effort' to restore the racial purity Tacitus mentioned,&quot; Krebs writes. The guidebook for the Hitler Youth carried an epigraph from the <em>Germania</em>: &quot;It is the greatest honor, the greatest power to be at all times surrounded by a huge band of chosen young men.&quot; That Himmler himself—like Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels—presented a highly un-Aryan appearance didn't diminish his enthusiasm for turning the SS into a latter-day German aristocracy, as blond, tall, and warlike as Tacitus' chieftains. </p>
<p>Can all this be laid at Tacitus's doorstep? Was the book itself &quot;dangerous,&quot; or were its readers simply using it to reinforce beliefs and prejudices that came from elsewhere? Krebs, writing with the full horror of recent German history in mind, delivers a harsh verdict. &quot;Ideas are viruses. They depend on minds as their hosts, they replicate and mutate … and they gang up together to form ideologies,&quot; he writes in his introduction. And &quot;the <em>Germania </em>virus … after 350 years of incubation … progressed to a systemic infection culminating in the major crisis of the twentieth century.&quot; Modern readers have often wished that more classical texts could have survived the Dark Ages, but the <em>Germania</em> may be the rare exception. If the last surviving manuscript had been eaten by rats in a monk's library a thousand years ago, the world might have been better off.</p>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:47:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/07/ideas_are_viruses.htmlAdam Kirsch2011-07-25T10:47:00ZHow Tacitus' Germania became the bible of German nationalism.ArtsChristopher Krebs' A Most Dangerous Book: How did Tacitus' Germania give Germans such bad ideas?2299849Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2299849falsefalsefalseChristopher Krebs' A Most Dangerous Book: How did Tacitus' Germania give Germans such bad ideas?Christopher Krebs' A Most Dangerous Book: How did Tacitus' Germania give Germans such bad ideas?Christopher KrebsWhat the Children Knewhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/11/what_the_children_knew.html
<p>&quot;The children must never find out about what their father has suppressed,&quot; writes G&uuml;nter Grass in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0547245033?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0547245033"><em>The Box: Tales From the Darkroom</em></a>, his new memoir in the form of a novel. &quot;Not a word about guilt and other unwelcome deliveries.&quot; The last time Grass wrote about his life, in the more straightforward 2007 memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156035340?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0156035340"><em>Peeling the Onion</em></a>, suppression and guilt were all that readers wanted to talk about: in particular, the revelation that the teenage Grass, during the last days of the Second World War, had served in the Waffen SS, and concealed this fact for the next six decades. The story made headlines, and not just in book-review sections, because Grass has long been more than just another novelist. Ever since the publication of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0547339100?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0547339100"><em>The Tin Drum</em></a>, in 1959, he has been something like the conscience of postwar Germany—a position solidified when he won the Nobel Prize in 1999.</p>
<p>In his new book, the 83-year-old writer is still reckoning with the past. But this time he turns his attention to a different, and even more complicated, kind of accounting: the one that every parent owes to his children. This means exploring types of guilt and penance that are just as painful, if less sensational, than anything in <em>Peeling the Onion</em>: &quot;Now the inadequate father hopes the children will feel some compassion. For they cannot sweep aside his life, nor he theirs, pretending that none of it ever happened.&quot; </p>
<p>The conceit of <em>The Box </em>is that, rather than write directly about his experience of fatherhood, Grass allows his children to speak on their own behalf. In each chapter, he imagines a group of his offspring getting together for a meal and talking into a tape recorder about their early lives. The voices come out in a jumble, usually unattributed, without quotation marks; as a result, it is hard to disentangle their individual stories. They become &quot;the children,&quot; a chorus or jury, setting down evidence and passing judgment on their famous father. </p>
<p>This takes more than a few sessions, because, as the reader learns, Grass has eight children and stepchildren, by four different women—a family that's not so much &quot;blended&quot; as pureed. The four oldest—twins Pat and Jorsch, Lara, and Taddel—were the products of Grass' first marriage. As that marriage was breaking up, he had a daughter, Lena, by his mistress, before meeting the woman who would become his second wife, bringing her two sons, Jasper and Paul, into the Grass m&eacute;nage. Not until he had met Jasper and Paul's mother did Grass learn that, in between wives, he had also begotten another daughter, Nana, by yet another girlfriend. </p>
<p>It is easy to imagine that the products of such a family might have more grievances than those of more conventional backgrounds. For Grass to open his writing to his children's voices appears, then, like a gesture of reparation, and a remarkably vulnerable one: &quot;The father insists on having everything recorded. From now on, the children have the floor.&quot; But of course, even as Grass claims to be literally recording his children's voices, the reader knows that he is actually inventing them. (He even makes it deliberately unclear whether the names he gives them in <em>The Box</em> are their real names.) He has, in fact, &quot;authored&quot; his children twice over: first by conceiving them, then by turning them into semi-fictional characters. &quot;Typical, there he goes, lying again,&quot; says one of them in <em>The Box</em>. &quot;Just as we, sitting here talking and talking, can't be sure what he's going to talk us into next.&quot;</p>
<p>Is writing in this way the act of a generous father, maybe even a penitent one, or of a tyrannical egotist? This ambiguity is what gives <em>The Box</em> its modest but genuine power. Grass brings the question to the fore by introducing into the seemingly factual accounts of his children's lives—the houses they lived in, the schools they attended, their first loves, their family quarrels—a blatantly magical-realist device of the sort he employs in his novels. This is the box of the title, which is actually an old-fashioned box camera, a popular Agfa model made in Germany in the 1930s. </p>
<p>This particular camera belongs to a mysterious older woman named Marie, a close friend of Grass', and the snapshots it takes are equally mysterious. As she puts it, &quot;My box takes pictures of things that aren't there. And it sees things that weren't there. Or shows things you'd never in your wildest dreams imagine.&quot; Sometimes, people appear in these pictures as they dream of being in their fantasies. A daughter in her Communion dress is shown &quot;splattered with chocolate sauce,&quot; because she was longing to get the ceremony over with and rush to the dessert table; another girl wants a puppy, and Marie's photo shows her with a puppy. </p>
<p>But this is the least of the camera's powers. When the fictional Grass asks Marie to take pictures—of a house, a landscape, or odds and ends like &quot;fish skeletons, gnawed bones, that kind of thing&quot;—the result is a vision of the past or the future, which the novelist can put to use in his books. When he was writing the novel <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Mouse-Gunter-Grass/dp/0848801121/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1288968011&amp;sr=1-2">Cat and Mouse</a></em>, Grass asked Marie to photograph cats; when he was writing <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/015626112X?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=015626112X">Dog Years</a></em>, she took pictures of dogs. And sometimes, &quot;when she was furious,&quot; Marie's photos would reveal grotesque punishments. A snapshot of the disobedient Taddel and Jasper reveals them &quot;transplanted … to the Middle Ages, condemn[ed] to child labor on a treadmill … quivering under lashes.&quot; </p>
<p>It does not take long to figure out Grass' allegory: The camera is an emblem of the novelist's imagination, and Marie is a homely figure for the muse. By making things so literal, Grass seems to want to pose in the simplest, most childlike terms the question that dominates the book. Is it a blessing or a curse to have a writer for a father, to have your childhood populated by his uncanny visions? Sometimes the children express their love and wonder for Marie's photos; but what comes across most clearly is their jealousy of Marie. &quot;He always has something to hide,&quot; they complain into a kind of collective chorus. &quot;That's why no one knows what goes on in his head.&quot;</p>
<p>But Marie has special access, which none of Grass' wives or lovers or children can rival. &quot;Of all the women I've loved, or still love, Mariechen is the only one who doesn't demand even a smidgen of me, but gives everything,&quot; Grass declares. To which his children reply, &quot;That was the pasha speaking again.&quot; The novelist can't help knowing that there is something unjust, even monstrous, about the total power that his art gives him over his family's stories. On the very last page of <em>The Box</em>, Grass imagines them seceding from his version of reality, reclaiming their lives from his imagination: &quot;All grown up now, the children assume stern expressions. They point their fingers at him. … Now the children have reclaimed their real names. Now the father is shrinking, wants to vanish into thin air.&quot; </p>
<p>But at the same time, Grass continues to believe—as, of course, he must—that a novelist's imagination gives him access to a truth beyond accuracy: &quot;Had [Marie] and her box not existed, the father would know less about his children,&quot; he concludes. He is even willing to pay the price for this uncanny insight, to suffer the deserved punishment that the box reveals in its most comically disturbing images: &quot;In eight little photos the sons and daughters came together in a horde and slew their father—presumably at his wish—with their flint axes and split him open … and roasted the chunks slowly over glowing embers until they were well cooked through and crisp, whereupon the last of the photos showed all of them looking well fed and contented.&quot;</p>
<p><em>Like </em><strong><em>Slate </em></strong><em>on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/slate">Facebook</a>. Follow us on <a href="http://http/www.twitter.com/slate">Twitter</a>.</em></p>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:53:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/11/what_the_children_knew.htmlAdam Kirsch2010-11-22T11:53:00ZG&uuml;nter Grass is still reckoning with the past in his fictional memoir.ArtsG&uuml;nter Grass reckons with the past in The Box.2274434Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2274434falsefalsefalseGünter Grass reckons with the past in The Box.Günter Grass reckons with the past in The Box.What Is the Future of Avant-Garde Fiction?http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/09/what_is_the_future_of_avantgarde_fiction.html
<p>Certain books, like certain heroes in books, arrive in the world haloed with great expectations. They cannot simply be good or bad; to pass judgment on them is to judge a whole way of writing and thinking. Thus Jonathan Franzen's new book, <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374158460?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0374158460">Freedom</a>, </em>is being appraised not just as a novel, but as a test case for the survival of the realistic novel, of the ability of the socially aware novelist to capture the imagination of the society he writes about. In the eyes of a smaller but probably even more enthusiastic readership, Tom McCarthy is a writer of destiny in this sense, but the destiny he represents is the opposite of Franzen's. He is the standard-bearer of the avant-garde novel, of fiction consumed by its own status as fiction, and of the avant-garde writer as an unassailable provocateur. In an influential review of McCarthy's previous novel, <em>Remainder</em>,<em></em>Zadie Smith wrote that McCarthy &quot;clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward.&quot;</p>
<p> Now comes <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307593339?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0307593339">C,</a></em> McCarthy's new novel, the book that is supposed to show us the future of fiction. And here is how it begins: &quot;Dr. Learmont, newly appointed general practitioner for the districts of West Masedown and New Eliry, rocks and jolts on the front seat of a trap as it descends the lightly sloping path of Versoie House.&quot; It is a wonderfully canny move on McCarthy's part. How does an experimental novelist surprise his admirers, whose appetite for the new buffers them against any possible surprise? He writes a Victorian pastiche—a sentence of the kind that Virginia Woolf already declared out-dated in the 1910s.</p>
<p>In fact, <em>C, </em>which follows the life of a young Englishman named Serge Carrefax from his birth in the 1890s until the 1920s, is set in just the period when, according to Woolf, human character changed. This is the golden age of the avant-garde, of futurism and modernism, and it provides McCarthy with an answer to the problem of how to write an avant-garde novel today. If modernism is history--in both senses of the world--then the modernist novel must be a historical novel, a deliberate reconstruction of a world and a way of thinking that are no longer our own<strong>.</strong> And that is what <em>C</em> is, at bottom: a brilliant historical novel, packed with the kind of information that is such novels' stock-in-trade. What was it like, for instance, to use a primitive radio set? </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The transmitter itself is made of standard brass, a four-inch tapper arm keeping Serge's finger a safe distance from the spark gap. ... Tonight, as on most nights, he starts out local, sweeping from two hundred and fifty to four hundred metres. It's the usual traffic: CQ signals from experimental wireless stations in Masedown and Eliry, tapping out their call signs and then slipping into Q-code once another bug's responded.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is a great deal of such sheer fact in <em>C</em>, not just about radios, but about combat aviation in World War I, Egyptian burial practices, the cultivation of silkworms, and on and on. And just as the heroine of the classic bodice-ripper <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1556524048?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1556524048">Forever Amber</a></em> is conveniently on hand for all the major historical events of Restoration England—the Great Fire of London, the black plague—so Serge matters less as a character than as a lens, to be passed over a series of historical dioramas. Through Serge's eyes, we see his father's school for deaf children, where he grows up; a health resort in Central Europe; the Western Front; postwar London; and finally colonial Egypt. It doesn't really matter, for McCarthy's purposes, that Serge has no depth or development as a character and responds to everything with the same slightly anesthetized curiosity. As McCarthy showed in <em>Remainder</em>, he is not interested in psychology, but in phenomenology. He is at his best when he writes in revelatory, estranging detail about the way things look, feel, sound, work. </p>
<p>At the same time, McCarthy is also an expert parodist. In his witty, mock-Barthesian study, <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1582434050?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1582434050">Tintin and the Secret of Literature</a></em>, he kept a totally straight face while applying the tools of deconstruction to Herg&eacute;'s adventure comics, and in <em>C</em> he glories in the artificiality, the allusiveness, of his writing. Serge Carrefax is born with a caul, like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140439447?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0140439447">David Copperfield</a>. He spends the period just before World War I in a sanatorium, like Hans Castorp in <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679772871?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0679772871">The Magic Mountain</a></em>; but while Mann's patients were tubercular, McCarthy's suffer from constipation, and they wander the grounds carrying jugs of their own feces. (&quot;The matter inside is solid, liquorice-black, with an undulating surface in whose folds and creases small reserves of dark red moisture have collected.&quot;) </p>
<p>After the war, Serge returns to the London of &quot;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393974995?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0393974995">The Waste Land</a>.&quot; When he sleeps with a chorus girl, McCarthy fills the scene with echoes of the &quot;young man carbuncular&quot; episode from Eliot's poem. Are there also echoes, in this section's druggy parties, of Dorothy Sayers's interwar mystery novel, <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061043559?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061043559">Murder Must Advertise</a></em>? Hard to say, but I wouldn't rule it out; and in any case, guessing wrong is part of the fun of this sort of literary game. Certainly the novel's last section wants us to think of Cavafy and Forster, who spent the war years in Alexandria. (There's even a character named Morgan.)</p>
<p>If all this feels like a kind of code-breaking, that is just what McCarthy intends, since <em>C</em> is a novel obsessed with codes and connections. Like Thomas Pynchon, to whom he is deeply indebted (the title <em>C</em> is an homage to <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060930217?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0060930217">V,</a></em> and the book's continent-hopping parodies are a more successful version of what Pynchon did in <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143112562?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0143112562">Against the Day</a>), </em>McCarthy believes that the 20<sup>th</sup> century ushered in a paranoid age, that we are ruled and ensnared by our technology. When Serge's father experiments with primitive radio waves, McCarthy gestures toward the birth of the Internet: One day, he rants, &quot;there'll be a web around the world for them to send their signals down.&quot; </p>
<p>This kind of unabashed anachronism marks the difference between <em>C </em>and an ordinary historical novel. McCarthy is not trying to imagine what it felt like to live in the past. Rather, he is reimagining the past as a prologue to our encoded, networked present. Whenever McCarthy gets going on the subject of codes, in fact, the novel shifts into a kind of monomaniacal insistence: &quot;He starts seeing all of London's surfaces and happenings as potentially encrypted: street signage, chalk-marks scrawled on walls, phrases on newspaper vendors' stalls. ...&quot; </p>
<p>This kind of thing has given McCarthy the kind of cutting-edge reputation he wants, as surely as Franzen wants mainstream acclaim. But what really justifies this rather pretentious theoretical obsession is that it gives McCarthy the permission he seems to need<strong></strong>to write beautiful descriptive prose like this vision of air combat in World War I: &quot;At one point a howitzer shell appears right beside them, travelling in the same direction—one of their own, surfacing above the smoke-bank like a porpoise swimming alongside a ship, slowly rotating in the air to show its underbelly as it hovers at its peak before beginning its descent.&quot; This&nbsp;sort of closely imagined visual detail<strong></strong>is what makes <em>C </em>genuinely exciting to read, despite its lack of interest in plot and character. It's enough to make you suspect that what &quot;C&quot; really stands for is not code, connection, cocaine, Carrefax, or any of the other hints the novel dangles, but the oldest of all fictional imperatives: &quot;See.&quot; </p>
<p><em>Like <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Slate"><strong>Slate</strong> on Facebook</a>. Follow us <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Slate">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:03:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/09/what_is_the_future_of_avantgarde_fiction.htmlAdam Kirsch2010-09-13T14:03:00ZRead Tom McCarthy's C and find out.ArtsTom McCarthy's C shows the future of fiction.2266862Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2266862falsefalsefalseTom McCarthy's C shows the future of fiction.Tom McCarthy's C shows the future of fiction.The Literary Critic as Humanisthttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/08/the_literary_critic_as_humanist.html
<p>In 2000, Frank Kermode, the great literary critic and scholar who died last week at the age of 90, gave a lecture called &quot;The Cambridge Connection&quot; about the history of the Cambridge University English department. It sounds like a parochial enough topic until you realize that the major figures in that department were I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis—probably the most important English critics of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Kermode was too modest to include himself in the list. This was a man, after all, who titled his memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374525927?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0374525927"><em>Not Entitled</em></a><em>—</em>but he was of the same stature and belonged to the same tradition. </p>
<p>This was, as he described it, the &quot;old school [that] was always worried about keeping open the channels between the academy and the intelligentsia broadly conceived.&quot; In another essay, he remembered that when he was starting his career in the early 1950s, there was &quot;a general belief, now weirdly archaic, that literary criticism was extremely important, possibly the most important humanistic discipline, not only in the universities but also in the civilized world more generally.&quot; </p>
<p>Reading those words is a reminder that with Kermode's death, a whole era of literary culture is nearly at its end. He was one of the last exemplars of an ideal that dates back at least to Matthew Arnold: the ideal of the literary critic as the humanist <em>par excellence</em>. What gave the critic his special authority was the way that he thought and wrote at the intersection—of the classics and the contemporary world, of literature and society, of the academy and the common reader. As Kermode recognized, few professors of English aspire to that kind of role anymore: &quot;This is an age of theory, and theory is both difficult and usually not related to anything that meets the wider interest I speak of.&quot; This judgment is all the more persuasive because Kermode himself was no enemy of the abstruse critical theory that came to England and America from France in the 1970s. In fact, he made headlines in 1982 when he resigned from the Cambridge English department to protest its refusal to promote a junior professor because he was a &quot;Structuralist.&quot;</p>
<p>Just to list Kermode's books is to see how wide his own interests were. In our age of specialization, it is hard to imagine that a single scholar will again be able to write seminal books on so many subjects: English Renaissance poetry, Shakespeare, Modernism, the Bible as literature, apocalyptic thought, and more. And that is not to mention Kermode's second life as a reviewer and journalist. He was an editor of <em>Encounter </em>(he resigned when he learned that the magazine was funded by the CIA) and helped to launch the <em>London Review of Books</em>;<em></em>he wrote regularly for the <em>LRB</em>, the <em>New York Review of Books</em>, the<em> New Republic</em>, and other magazines. </p>
<p>The last book he published before he died was <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1873092040?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1873092040"><em>Bury Place Papers</em></a>, a collection of his <em>LRB </em>essays, which shows that he was a tough and witty critic as well as a learned one. His review of Martin Amis' essay collection <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375727167?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0375727167"><em>The War Against Clich&eacute;</em></a> is a master class in quiet devastation: &quot;The main title of this collection may at first seem wantonly non-descriptive, but it turns out to be exact,&quot; Kermode begins. &quot;The first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used thinking. The more positive requirements can be left till later, if only a little later.&quot; It takes a minute to realize that Kermode's verdict on Amis has just been delivered and that there will be no appeal. </p>
<p>Kermode's scholarly writing benefits from the virtues of his literary journalism. His style is poised and urbane, free from the harshness and obscurity that are the besetting sins of academic prose. He always writes with the intelligent general reader in mind, and the benefits of this approach go beyond style. It is what allows Kermode to write literary criticism as though it were actually a part of literature—a way of interpreting and responding to life just as poetry and fiction are. </p>
<p>The best of Kermode's books, in fact, are genuinely moving, because his commentary on texts becomes his means of grappling with fundamental human experiences. <a href="mailto:http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=frank+kermode&amp;sts=t&amp;tn=romantic+image&amp;x=0&amp;y=0"><em>Romantic Image</em></a>, his reputation-making study of Modernist poetry, discusses the metaphor of the dance in Yeats and Eliot; but it is also a book about the longing for transcendence, the way art tries to escape from time. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674345355?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0674345355"><em>The Genesis of Secrecy</em></a> is a study of the narrative techniques of the New Testament, but it is also a meditation on the needs and hopes that make human beings impose meaning on the world.</p>
<p>Above <a></a> all, there is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195136128?ie=UTF8%26tag=slatmaga-20%26linkCode=as2%26camp=1789%26creative=390957%26creativeASIN=0195136128"><em>The Sense of an Ending</em></a>, Kermode's 1966 masterpiece. <a href="http://www.slate.com#Correction">*</a> &nbsp;These six lectures are subtitled &quot;Studies in the Theory of Fiction,&quot; but for Kermode, thinking about the way stories end is a way of thinking about the way lives end, and the way we imagine the world will end. The existential urgency of fiction, for Kermode, is made clear in the book's last chapter, where he discusses <a href="mailto:http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Christopher+Burney&amp;sts=t&amp;tn=Solitary+confinement&amp;x=0&amp;y=0"><em>Solitary Confinement</em></a>, the memoir of Christopher Burney, who was taken prisoner by the Nazis while working as a British agent in occupied France. Kermode—who served in the Royal Navy during World War II—sees the prisoner in his cell as the archetypal storyteller: &quot;Down on the bedrock,&quot; he quotes Burney as writing, &quot;life becomes a love affair of the mind.&quot; The best writers, including the best critics, invite us to share the lives they have imagined into being—which is why, like Kermode, they continue to live even after they are gone.<br /><br /><em><strong>Correction, <a></a> Aug. 27, 2010: </strong>This piece originally left out the &quot;an&quot; in the title </em>The Sense of an Ending<em>. Return to the corrected sentence. (<a href="http://www.slate.com#Return">Return</a> &nbsp;to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>
<p><em>Like&nbsp;<strong> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Slate">Slate</a> &nbsp;</strong>on Facebook. Follow us on&nbsp;</em> <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Slate"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>.</em></p>Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:06:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/08/the_literary_critic_as_humanist.htmlAdam Kirsch2010-08-26T15:06:00ZFrank Kermode, 1919-2010, exemplified an ideal that is dying.ArtsFrank Kermode, 1919-2010, exemplified an ideal that is dying.2265191Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2265191falsefalsefalseFrank Kermode, 1919-2010, exemplified an ideal that is dying.Frank Kermode, 1919-2010, exemplified an ideal that is dying.Emily Dickinson's New Secrethttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/06/emily_dickinsons_new_secret.html
<p> Several times a week, during the last two years of Emily Dickinson's life, a weird and symbolic drama would play itself out in the old Dickinson family house, the Homestead. At 2:30 in the afternoon, the poet's brother, Austin—a married father of three, a pillar of Amherst society, and the treasurer of Amherst College—would leave his house next door, ostensibly to pay a call on Emily and his other sister, Lavinia. In fact, he came to meet Mabel Loomis Todd, the seductive young wife of the Amherst College astronomer David Todd, and have sex with her on Emily Dickinson's dining room couch. We know exactly what happened and when, because Austin, a lawyer with good business habits, recorded everything punctually in his diary. On January 3, 1886, for instance, he wrote, &quot;at the other house 3 to 5 and +=====XXX.&quot; Mabel, who also kept a diary, wrote rather more tenderly on the same day: &quot;A most exquisitely happy and satisfactory two hours.&quot;</p>
<p>While the lovers trysted on the first floor, Emily Dickinson was up in her bedroom on the second. She must have known perfectly well what was going on. As Lyndall Gordon writes in <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670021938?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0670021938">Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds</a></em>, there must have been some kind of understanding about which rooms the poet was not to enter and when for fear of getting an eyeful. But what makes the story so odd, and so characteristic of Dickinson, is that she managed to live in the same house where Todd was so unmistakably present without ever meeting her. In fact, when Emily Dickinson died, on May 15, 1886, she had never once laid eyes on Mabel Todd—the woman who tore her family apart and who would make her poetry famous. </p>
<p>The two women continue their wary standoff in the pages of Gordon's book, which starts out as a patchy biography of Dickinson before turning into a fascinating account of Todd's contentious role in Dickinson's afterlife. They are so different that they almost parody the conventional distinction between the life of letters and the life of action, or what the poet called &quot;nobody&quot; and &quot;somebody&quot;:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm Nobody! Who are you?<br />Are you—Nobody—too?<br />Then there's a pair of us?<br />Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!</p>
<p>How dreary—to be—Somebody!<br />How public—like a Frog— <br />To tell one's name—the livelong June— <br />To an admiring Bog!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mabel, born in 1856, came from a poor family, and she was determined to use her beauty and intelligence to move up in the world, to &quot;tell her name,&quot; despite all obstacles. &quot;There are capacities in me, I know, which I've not yet begun to feel,&quot; she wrote at the age of 21. &quot;I shall yet do something which will be heard of—that I know.&quot; She would do many things in her life—travel around the world, become a popular lecturer, have adventurous love affairs—but as fate would have it, the &quot;something&quot; that made her name was to edit and publish the poems of Emily Dickinson.</p>
<p>Dickinson's fame, of course, comes in no small part from what she refused to do. She rarely left her house, and her romances exist mostly in the realm of rumor and scholarly speculation. Most mysterious of all, this author of nearly two thousand poems, including some of the greatest ever produced by an American, published just a handful of minor lyrics in her lifetime. When she died, she left behind a locked chest full of manuscripts, with many poems copied into small handmade booklets. It was Mabel Loomis Todd, more than anyone else, who was responsible for unearthing these poems, transcribing them, editing them, and seeing them into print. The unearthly genius of Dickinson needed Todd's worldly wisdom in order to win immortality.</p>
<p>Treating these two lives in the same book, as Gordon has tried to do, is a challenge: They resist each other on the page as they did in life. For the first half of <em>Lives Like Loaded Guns</em>, Gordon focuses on Emily Dickinson's story, and she puts forward one major new claim: Based on medical records and family history, and, more doubtfully, on the evidence of the poems themselves, she suggests that Dickinson was epileptic. This would explain why she preferred near-total privacy—she was afraid of other people witnessing her attacks at a time when the disease carried a stigma, especially for women. It would also explain why her family indulged her preference for staying up all night writing poems and avoiding all housework—a kind of freedom that most New England women could only dream of.</p>
<p>Even as she makes epilepsy a kind of key to Dickinson's mysteries, however—reading lines like &quot;I seek the Dark/ Till I am thorough fit&quot; as coded allusions to epileptic fits—Gordon is clearly uneasy with the very notion of using the poet's life to explain her work. Were the famous &quot;Master Letters,&quot; in which Dickinson seems to address a lover, written to the newspaper editor Samuel Bowles, as has been speculated? Yes and no, Gordon replies: Bowles may have provided their occasion, but the letters are mainly rhetorical performances, &quot;fertile imaginings of a potential situation that might have grown out of an initial situation we aren't meant to recover.&quot; Even when Dickinson sends Bowles an apparently erotic poem like &quot;Two swimmers wrestled on the spar,&quot; Gordon deflects speculation: &quot;to pursue biography is not what this poem asks us to do.&quot; True enough; but such interpretive austerity sounds odd in the context of what is, after all, a biography. It is as though Gordon—whose previous book was a life of Mary Wollstonecraft, a major &quot;somebody&quot;—felt slightly ashamed of her trade in the face of Dickinson's immense reserve. </p>
<p>The book shifts into a higher gear once Todd comes onto the scene. She is a biographer's dream, starting with the clandestine affair with Austin Dickinson, which bloomed into a m&eacute;nage-a-trois involving David Todd (and, at least once, Gordon suggests, a m&eacute;nage-a-quatre, with another woman taking part). This affair was not only devastating to the Dickinson family; as Gordon shows in the most innovative part of her book, it had major repercussions for the way future generations would understand Emily Dickinson's life and work. In particular, Gordon is writing to rehabilitate the reputation of Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Austin's wife and Mabel's hated rival. Sue was Emily's trusted reader and close friend: &quot;I chose this single star/ From out the wide night's numbers—/ Sue—forevermore!&quot; she wrote in a poem for her sister-in-law's 28<sup>th</sup> birthday. But after the poet's death, Mabel Todd convinced Lavinia Dickinson—Emily's sister and the heir to her manuscripts—to entrust the unpublished verse to her care. This was a boon for readers, who benefited from what Gordon calls Todd's &quot;rigorous&quot; and &quot;scrupulous&quot; editing of these eccentric texts—as well as her total faith in Dickinson's genius, in the face of skepticism from editors, one of whom rejected the manuscript with the opinion that Dickinson was &quot;generally devoid of the true poetical qualities.&quot;</p>
<p>But Mabel Todd's editorial control also allowed her to obliterate Sue's friendship with Emily—sometimes by literally erasing her name from documents—and turn her into a villain for Dickinson biographers, a calculating woman who married into the socially superior Dickinson family and proceeded to make Austin's life a loveless misery. The enmity between Austin's wife and mistress even passed on, like a Biblical feud, to the next generation. As late as the 1930s, Gordon shows, Mabel's daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, and Sue's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, were publishing rival editions of Emily Dickinson's poems and slandering one another's treatment of her life. Martha's <em> <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=1927435181&amp;searchurl=an%3DMartha%2BDickinson%2BBianchi%26sts%3Dt%26x%3D29%26y%3D1">Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson</a></em> created, more or less out of whole cloth, the legend of the poet's doomed love for the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, casting this alleged romance as the key to her aunt's seclusion: &quot;Without stopping to look back, she fled to her own home for refuge—as a wild thing running,&quot; she wrote in typically purple prose. Gordon quotes the notes Millicent made in her copy of the book: &quot;Bosh!&quot;, &quot;ugh,&quot; &quot;Oh yeah?&quot; She got her own back with <em> <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=1863746179&amp;searchurl=an%3DMillicent%2BTodd%2BBingham%26sts%3Dt%26x%3D0%26y%3D0">Ancestors' Brocades</a>, </em>a study in which she suggested that Dickinson's retirement was actually a way of escaping the malevolence of Sue. The all-too-human machinations of the poet's family and friends make for a good, gossipy story. But by the end of Gordon's book, we are more than ready to concede Dickinson's &quot;public&quot; legacy to the croaking frogs and seal ourselves up in the privacy of her poems, as she recommended:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reverse cannot befall<br />That fine Prosperity<br />Whose Sources are interior—<br />As soon—Adversity</p>
<p>A Diamond—overtake<br />In far—Bolivian Ground<br />Misfortune hath no implement<br />Could mar it—if it found—</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Like&nbsp;</em> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Slate"><em><strong>Slate</strong>&nbsp;on Facebook</em></a><em>. Follow us&nbsp;</em> <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Slate"><em>on Twitter</em></a><em>.</em></p>Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:13:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/06/emily_dickinsons_new_secret.htmlAdam Kirsch2010-06-28T11:13:00ZLife in that Amherst house was more exciting than we knew.ArtsNew secrets about Emily Dickinson in Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns.&nbsp;2255272Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2255272falsefalsefalseNew secrets about Emily Dickinson in Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns. New secrets about Emily Dickinson in Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns. The Slippery Scientisthttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/03/the_slippery_scientist.html
<p> Five years ago, Ian McEwan published <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400076196?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1400076196">Saturday</a></em>, a novel in which a man of science is made to symbolize everything that is noble and worth defending about our civilization. Henry Perowne, the main character, is not only a brilliant neurosurgeon but a doting husband and father and a man of honor. In the novel's climactic scene—a classic example of McEwan's manipulative horror—he must defend his home and family against a criminal who is suffering from a degenerative brain disease. It is a fable of reason against unreason, written at a time when London was still reeling from an attack by religious fanatics, and McEwan allows his hero to triumph, with strength but also with compassion. (Having subdued the intruder, Perowne goes to the hospital to perform a life-saving operation on him.) If the West can produce a man like Henry Perowne, McEwan seems to say, there is hope for us yet.</p>
<p>What are we to make, then, of a civilization that can produce Michael Beard, the scientist at the center of McEwan's new novel, <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385533411?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0385533411">Solar</a></em>? Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who has devoted his middle age to solving the climate change crisis by inventing a new form of artificial photosynthesis—in short, a hero for our times. He is also, as McEwan delights in showing us, a total bastard: a liar, adulterer, thief, bad citizen, bad father, and to top things off, a compulsive eater of salt-and-vinegar potato chips:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;The trick,&quot; he explains, &quot;was to set the fragment on the centre of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. His theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a very scientific way to eat chips (or crisps), and a very McEwan-like way to write about it. Martin Amis' antiheroes are as devoted to junk food, and sex and alcohol, as Beard. But for Amis, all these vices are the occasion for grotesque, Hogarthian satire. McEwan, on the other hand, has always been a cool, clinical writer. When Beard, just before delivering a talk, wolfs down nine smoked-salmon sandwiches (&quot;he was not at the moment truly hungry, but he was, in his own term, pre-hungry&quot;) and then spends the whole speech struggling with the urge to vomit, McEwan seems to be setting up a pretty broad and familiar kind of joke. But when he writes of the &quot;stagnant estuary, decaying gaseously in his gut,&quot; the &quot;bloated carcass within his own … odiously stirring,&quot; the &quot;fishy reflex rising from his gorge, like salted anchovies, with a dash of bile,&quot; it is not laughter the reader fights to keep down, but a sympathetic gag reflex. </p>
<p>Throughout <em>Solar</em>, Beard inspires this same unsettling mixture of humor and disgust. When the novel opens, in the year 2000, he seems a pitiable figure. It has been decades since he won the Nobel, for something called the Beard-Einstein Conflation, and at age 53 he has settled into the routine life of a scientific administrator. He can hardly be bothered to feign interest in the work of the Centre for Renewable Energy, of which he is the nominal chief. All his own energy goes into the debacle of his fifth marriage: His wife Patrice is openly having an affair with a builder named Tarpin in retaliation for Beard's prolific womanizing. </p>
<p>The clearest sign of Beard's cynicism is the way he refuses to listen to Tom Aldous, a young postdoc at the Centre with all the passion and brilliance he himself has lost. Aldous is convinced that, using Beard's Conflation (which McEwan, wisely, does not attempt to explain), he can devise a way of producing cheap, unlimited solar power. The friendlier and more idealistic Aldous seems, however, the more he disgusts Beard: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;There were novels Aldous wanted him to read—novels!—and developments in contemporary music he thought Beard should be aware of, and movies that were of particular relevance, documentaries about climate change which Aldous had seen at least twice but would happily see again if there was a chance of making the Chief sit through them too.&quot; </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a sign of McEwan's comic skill that he makes us sympathize with Beard's irritation at the very idea of reading a novel, while we are—of course—reading a novel. McEwan has always declared, no doubt a little mischievously, his preference for the sciences over the humanities. Later in <em>Solar</em>, a flashback shows us Beard at college, wooing his first wife by faking an interest in Milton and discovering how much easier it is to bullshit about literature than about physics: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week. He suspected there was nothing they talked about there that anyone with half an intelligence could not understand. … And yet they passed themselves off as his intellectual superiors, these lie-a-beds, and he had let them intimidate him. No longer … he was intellectually free.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It takes a careful reader to detect McEwan's irony inside Beard's irony, to remember that this tirade against literature is delivered by a character who is himself, the reader comes to learn, an intellectual fraud. It would spoil the book to reveal any of McEwan's carefully plotted twists—how Beard wriggles free of the personal and professional traps that surround him only to find himself, in the end, on the brink of even worse calamities. Longtime readers of McEwan know how skilled he is at producing disasters from the ordinary, the way a magician pulls a bunny from a hat. They will recognize that when McEwan casually mentions a slippery rug in the first few pages of <em>Solar</em>, it is the equivalent of Chekhov's loaded gun in the first act. </p>
<p>And the larger meanings of <em>Solar</em> are no more straightforward. Is science really so divorced from the humanities, or intelligence from goodness, as McEwan provokingly suggests? It is not clear that he wants us to think so, or that he intends <em>Solar </em>to feel as misanthropic as it often does. But in a novel full of grim jokes, the grimmest is the possibility that if the planet is to stand a chance of being saved, its fate may lie in the hands of a man like Michael Beard.</p>
<p><em><em></em></em></p>
<p><em>Become a fan of&nbsp; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Slate"><strong>Slate</strong>&nbsp;on Facebook</a>. Follow us on&nbsp; <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Slate">Twitter</a>.</em></p>Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:01:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/03/the_slippery_scientist.htmlAdam Kirsch2010-03-26T22:01:00ZIan McEwan on the gulf between goodness and intelligence.ArtsIan McEwan's Solar.2247911Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2247911falsefalsefalseIan McEwan's Solar.Ian McEwan's Solar.A Comedian in the Academyhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/02/a_comedian_in_the_academy.html
<p> Are comical things more likely to happen to funny people, or is funniness simply the ability to make ordinary things seem comical? Reading <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374532184?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0374532184">The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them</a></em>, the smartly comic new memoir by Elif Batuman, makes you wonder. Countless people have gone to graduate school—as Batuman did, in Russian literature at Stanford—and almost as many have spent some time studying abroad—as Batuman did when she spent a summer learning Uzbek in the Central Asian city of Samarkand. Even if you haven't done either, you already know the clich&eacute;s about both—the unfinishable dissertation, the weird host family.</p>
<p>It may seem unpromising for a writer as young as Batuman (she was born in 1977) to attempt a memoir based on such a conventional CV. Yet in writing about her own education, Batuman manages to make it sound wonderfully grotesque, like a cross between Borges and Borat. What makes this possible is her wry, detached sense of humor, always on the lookout for scholarly absurdity, and the understated wit of her writing. Just as important, Batuman is not too cautious to name names; few professors or would-be professors would say so much about their colleagues' foibles without using the protective cover of fiction.</p>
<p>Take &quot;Babel in California,&quot; a chapter describing an international gathering of Isaac Babel scholars that Batuman helped to organize at Stanford. To most of the attendees, this was probably just an academic get-together like any other. In Batuman's hands, it becomes a snowballing series of absurdities worthy of Kingsley Amis. When she tries to put together an exhibition of Babel-related materials from the Hoover Institution archives, its staff keeps insisting that she make the display more accessible by including irrelevant &quot;three-dimensional objects&quot;: a fur hat (&quot;I'm afraid it's not quite authentic. Someone picked it up at a flea market in Moscow. But it looks, you know, like a Russian fur hat&quot;), or a Cossack costume (&quot;OK, <em>the problem</em> is that it's child's size. ... But that's not entirely a bad thing. I mean, because it's in a child's size, it will definitely fit in the case. ...&quot;). Then there's the fear that Batuman is being politically incorrect about Cossacks: &quot;Please call ASAP regarding portrayal of Cossacks as primitive monsters,&quot; reads one of her phone messages. When Batuman replies that &quot;the likelihood of any Cossacks actually attending the exhibit was very slim,&quot; the exhibition coordinator tells her, &quot;you never know in California.&quot;</p>
<p>The high point—or low point, depending on your perspective—comes when Nathalie Babel, the writer's aged daughter, arrives in Palo Alto and turns out to be a terror. Recording a conversation between Nathalie and a professor named Janet Lind, Batuman makes perfect use of comic capitals: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;JANET,&quot; Nathalie said finally, in her fathomless voice. &quot;IS IT TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME?&quot;</p>
<p>Janet Lind turned to her calmly. &quot;I beg your pardon?&quot;</p>
<p>&quot;IS IT TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME?&quot;</p>
<p>&quot;I can't imagine what makes you say that.&quot;<br />&quot;I say it because I would like to know if it is TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME.&quot;</p>
<p>&quot;That is an extremely odd question. What gives you an idea like that?&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And on it goes: Lind's refusal to deny the charge amounts to agreement, but she never says anything explicit enough to risk a formal breach of protocol. Academic protocol, in fact, is what makes Batuman's comedy possible; she knows that scholars observe a system of deference and politesse as rigid as at Versailles, and often as insincere. You see that decorum in action at another Russianists' conference, this time at Yasnaya Polnaya, Tolstoy's estate. When Aeroflot loses Batuman's luggage, she is forced to spend the whole time wearing the clothes she flew in, &quot;flip-flops, sweatpants, and a flannel shirt.&quot; This might happen anywhere, but only at a Tolstoy conference would Batuman's fellow scholars simply &quot;assume that I was a Tolstoyan—that like Tolstoy and his followers I had taken a vow to walk around in sandals and wear the same peasant shirt all day and all night.&quot;</p>
<p>This comedy of politeness is combined, when Batuman spends the summer in Uzbekistan, with the comedy of backwardness. Dilorom, Batuman's Uzbek tutor, teaches her about Bobur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, with special emphasis on his hemorrhoid problems: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;Every one of us does two things. We do them every day in the bathroom. ... Hey, God! Forgive me for mentioning these words in front of respected Elif!&quot; Dilorom went on to describe a certain affliction of the large intestine that caused great difficulties in one of the two things we do every day in the bathroom, involving swelling and pain and the passing of hard particles through the anus. In short, the Timurids, as passionate horsemen, suffered chronic hemorrhoids. Luckily, such was the refinement of their culture that they had a special grain that, when cooked with fat, water, and sugar, made a special porridge; when you ate it, you never had to defecate. &quot;Oh, if I could taste it even once!&quot; Dilorom exclaimed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is pretty broad humor, almost Sacha Baron Cohen-esque. But Batuman clearly has a deep respect for Dilorom—as she does for the scholarly enterprise itself, no matter how ludicrous it can be. After all, scholars are funny for the same reason clergymen have always been a staple of comedy—because of the contrast between their human flaws and the noble ideals they serve.</p>
<p>It's not just that Batuman writes about her affection for <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143035002?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0143035002">Anna Karenina</a></em> and Dostoevsky's <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375411224?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0375411224">Demons</a></em> (whose original title in translation was <em>The Possessed</em>), remembering the role these books played in her own development. That kind of love-letter to reading (&quot;<em>Anna Karenina</em> was a perfect book, with an otherworldly perfection ...&quot;) is common enough. What's really unusual, and challenging, is Batuman's praise of the most abstract kinds of literary theory.</p>
<p>It is conventional to talk about theorists—especially the dreaded <em>French</em> theorists—as if they were foes of the common reader, draining the reading experience of simple joy. But Batuman shows that, in her own life, the opposite has been true. When she first read <em>Anna Karenina </em>as a teenager, one of the things that struck her—as, after reading her, it must strike us—is the way Tolstoy readily recycles the names of characters: &quot;Anna's lover and her husband had the same first name (Alexei). Anna's maid and daughter were both called Anna, and Anna's son and half brother were both Sergei.&quot; Batuman writes that this kind of casual repetition seemed &quot;remarkable, surprising, and true to life.&quot; Once she gets to graduate school, she finds that the work of Jacques Derrida helps her to understand why: &quot;As Derrida once wrote, the singularity of the proper name is inextricable from its generality: it always has to be possible for one thing to be <em>named after</em> any other named thing. ... The basic tension of the name is that it simultaneously does and does not designate the unique individual.&quot; </p>
<p>Experiences like these help to convince Batuman, who started out wanting to be a novelist, that the academic study of literature is not the end of literary pleasure, but a new, deeper beginning. She even argues that theory can help us navigate our own lives. When Matej, a charismatic grad student, wreaks emotional havoc on Batuman and her female colleagues (and some of the males, too), she makes sense of him by invoking Rene Girard's theory of &quot;mimetic desire.&quot; Beyond all the jokes, this may be the most important contribution Batuman has to make in <em>The Possessed</em>. By fusing memoir and criticism, she shows how the life of literary scholarship is really lived—at its most ridiculous, and at its most unexpectedly sublime.</p>
<p><em>Become a fan of&nbsp;</em> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Slate"><em><strong>Slate&nbsp;</strong>on Facebook</em></a><em>. Follow us on&nbsp;</em> <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Slate"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>.</em></p>Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:55:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/02/a_comedian_in_the_academy.htmlAdam Kirsch2010-02-24T11:55:00ZWho knew studying Russian literature could be so funny?ArtsElif Batuman's The Possessed.2245194Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2245194falsefalsefalseElif Batuman's The Possessed.Elif Batuman's The Possessed.What's Romantic About Science?http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/07/whats_romantic_about_science.html
<p> The last time a scientific breakthrough made the front page, it was because science threatened to kill us all. The launch of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland last September was greeted with headlines like <em>Time</em>'s &quot;Collider Triggers End-of-the-World Fears&quot; as journalists tried to calculate the odds that the world's largest particle accelerator would accidentally tear apart the space-time continuum and annihilate the Earth. And it is not just such doomsday scenarios that make us suspicious of technological progress: On a philosophical level, too, scientific advances can look like human retreats. A century and a half after Darwin, there are millions of Christians who see evolution as an intolerable blow to human dignity, just as there are millions of environmentalists who see Western science as a scourge of the planet.</p>
<p>These 21<sup>st</sup>-century conundrums have been with us for a long time. In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375422226?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0375422226"><em>The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science</em></a>, &nbsp;Richard Holmes explores an early-19<sup>th</sup>-century period of terrific—and often terrified—excitement about science, of marvelous discoveries that raised humble experimenters to the rank of national heroes. Holmes' subjects—including astronomer William Herschel, chemist Humphry Davy, and explorer Mungo Park—were household names in England, but their discoveries were by no means always welcome ones. Herschel's observation of the stars, for instance, showed that the Milky Way was just one of a vast number of galaxies that were constantly being born, aging, and dying. The Milky Way, Herschel warned, &quot;cannot last forever.&quot; It followed, as Holmes writes, that &quot;our solar system, our planet, and hence our whole civilization would have an ultimate and unavoidable end.&quot; For the first time, the apocalypse was not a matter of religious faith but of demonstrated scientific fact.</p>
<p>Herschel's discoveries represent one face of what Holmes calls, loosely but suggestively, Romantic science. The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, as Holmes acknowledges: &quot;Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of <em>wonder</em> seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so.&quot; </p>
<p>Contemplating the immensity and strangeness of the universe could produce the same feeling of sublime terror that Coleridge strove for in &quot;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&quot; or that Wordsworth evokes in parts of his autobiographical epic &quot;The Prelude.&quot; In Keats' sonnet &quot;On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer,&quot; the poet compares his feeling of literary discovery with that of &quot;some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken&quot;; as Holmes explains, this was an allusion to Herschel's discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781, one of the stories told at length in <em>The Age of Wonder</em>.</p>
<p>At the same time, the growing fame of individual scientists made them seem larger-than-life, almost superhuman, like the Romantic persona cultivated by Lord Byron. The glamour of exploration was unmistakable: Joseph Banks, who returned from Tahiti with tales of erotic adventure, and Mungo Park, who spent two years charting the course of the Niger River, were objects of fascination on their return to England. (Banks stayed home and spent a long career as president of the Royal Society; Park returned to Africa and disappeared.) Humphry Davy's glamour was of a different kind. Alone in his laboratory, he penetrated the deepest secrets of nature, isolating the elements of sodium, iodine, and chlorine for the first time. His discoveries, his useful inventions (including a safety lamp for coal miners), and his brilliant popular lectures made him a celebrity and a social lion—he won a knighthood and a rich wife, although, as Holmes shows, neither made him happy.</p>
<p>Davy was also an accomplished poet who insisted on the close relationship between scientific and artistic ways of seeing. &quot;The perception of truth is almost always as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty,&quot; he wrote, &quot;and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind.&quot; It is the kind of observation one might expect from the polymath Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Davy's close friend. In a letter to Davy in 1800, Coleridge speculated on the affinity between science and poetry: &quot;[B]eing necessarily performed with <em>the passion of Hope</em>,&quot; the poet believed, science &quot;was poetical.&quot; </p>
<p>The phrase appeals strongly to Holmes, and he expands on it: &quot;Science, like poetry, was not merely 'progressive.' It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier world.&quot; &quot;Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,&quot; Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, and the revolution in science was just as heady.</p>
<p>Yet the Romantic poets also made the case against science in powerful terms that still influence our mistrust of science and technology. Science alienates us from nature and ourselves, Wordsworth wrote in &quot;The Tables Turned&quot;: &quot;Sweet is the lore which Nature brings/ Our meddling intellect/ Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:/ We murder to dissect.&quot; One of the best-known anecdotes about Keats, which Holmes duly recounts, has him complaining at a dinner party that Newton &quot;destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism&quot; and drinking a toast for &quot;confusion to Mathematics.&quot; And none other than Coleridge said that &quot;the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton&quot;—a view that, Holmes writes, &quot;has a peculiar power to outrage men of science, even modern ones.&quot; </p>
<p>But the most potent Romantic warning against the peril of science was Mary Shelley's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743487583?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0743487583"><em>Frankenstein</em></a>, to which Holmes devotes a chapter. Holmes shows that Shelley was alluding to Davy when she wrote, in <em>Frankenstein, </em>of how modern scientists &quot;have acquired new and almost unlimited Powers: they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadow.&quot; But the lesson of her book is that these powers are too great for human wisdom—that once they are unleashed, they may return to destroy their masters as Dr. Victor Frankenstein's monster turns on him. Shelley's creation clearly touched a nerve in English society: &quot;[I]t was made famous, if not notorious, in the 1820s by no less than five adaptations for the stage,&quot; Holmes writes.&nbsp; </p>
<p><em>Frankenstein</em> was a parable for an age when every scientific advance seemed to mark a threat. Sometimes the threats were quite literal. No sooner had Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier made the first manned balloon flight in Paris in November 1783, than Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador to France, was imagining the possibilities of balloon warfare: &quot;Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each&quot; could carry a French army across the Channel to England, where &quot;ten thousand Men descending from the Clouds might in many places do an infinite deal of mischief.&quot; </p>
<p>Even laughing gas, discovered by Davy in 1799, was unsettling in the very intensity of the pleasure it brought. &quot;The pleasurable sensation was at first local, and perceived in the lips and the cheeks,&quot; Davy recorded. &quot;It gradually, however, diffused itself over the whole body, and in the middle of the experiment was for a moment so intense and pure as to absorb existence. At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness.&quot; Was nitrous oxide, the world wondered, a boon to mankind, even a possible surgical anesthetic, or an excuse for moral decay and sexual license? It was rumored that Davy's laboratory witnessed uncanny scenes, as when a &quot;young woman was overcome by hysterical excitement, ran out of the laboratory, and rushed screaming down the street …where she was somewhat bizarrely reported to have 'jumped over a large dog' before she could be restrained and brought back.&quot; It sounds like something Mary Shelley might have dreamed.</p>
<p>Finally, <em>The Age of Wonder</em> places more faith in science's &quot;beauty&quot; than in its &quot;terror.&quot; &quot;We need,&quot; Holmes writes in a heartfelt epilogue, &quot;the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but <em>questing</em> belief in a future for the globe.&quot; Yet it is only because of science and technology, of course, that the future of the globe is in question. Without nuclear weapons and global warming, not to mention the Large Hadron Collider, we wouldn't need to reinforce our &quot;hope&quot; and &quot;belief&quot; in the survival of the species, which, until the 20<sup>th</sup> century, was taken for granted. There is a reason that Herschel and Davy, heroes in their own time, have been overshadowed by the eminent contemporary whose name everyone still knows, Frankenstein.</p>Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:35:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/07/whats_romantic_about_science.htmlAdam Kirsch2009-07-19T11:35:00ZWhen science became a source of sublime terror.ArtsRichard Holmes' The Age of Wonder.2222360Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2222360falsefalsefalseRichard Holmes' The Age of Wonder.Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder.Nowhere Manhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/05/nowhere_man.html
<p> Near the beginning of Aleksandar Hemon's novel <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594483752?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=1594483752">The Lazarus Project</a></em>, which came out last year to wide acclaim, the book's narrator, Vladimir Brik, is seated next to a woman named Susie at a dinner party. Though Susie is in her 70s, Hemon writes, she has &quot;the voracious curiosity of a college junior,&quot; and she plies Brik—who, like Hemon himself, is a native of Bosnia but moved to the United States in 1992, just before the siege of Sarajevo—with a series of intrusive questions. What gives the scene its bleak, Hemon-esque comedy is the way we never hear what Susie asks, only Brik's answers, which follow one another in a series of flat, polite declarations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am applying for grants so I can work on my book.<br />No, I am not Jewish. … Nor am I Muslim, Serb, or Croat.<br />I am complicated. …<br />Bosnian is not an ethnicity, it's a citizenship.<br />It's a long story. … Yes, it is hard to understand all that history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We don't need to hear the questions, Hemon makes clear, because Brik himself barely hears them, having been asked the same things so many times before. He is endlessly tolerant of American ignorance; he accepts the immigrant's burden of having to explain himself to people who know nothing about the world—about history, displacement, and suffering. </p>
<p>It is enough to turn any writer into a satirist, and in his first book, <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375727000?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0375727000">The Question of Bruno</a></em> (2000), Hemon wrote about America and Americans with a familiar kind of disdain. When Josef Pronek—Hemon's alter ego in that book and its successor, <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375727027?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0375727027">Nowhere Man</a></em> (2002)—touches down at a U.S. airport, he is immediately assailed by stereotypes. There is an obese customs agent (&quot;had someone opened the door of his booth, his flesh would have oozed out slowly, Pronek thought, like runny dough&quot;); a chatty waitress offering the pointless plenty of capitalism (&quot;What kinda beer? This is not Russia, hun, we got all kindsa beer. We got Michelob, Milleh, Milleh Lite, Milleh Genuine Draft. …&quot;); an elderly couple reading the Bible together and weeping. When a fellow passenger greets him by saying, &quot;What do you think of America? Isn't it the greatest country on earth?&quot; it is clear that Hemon means us to hear it as a punch line.</p>
<p>But a funny thing happened to the satirist: Instead of taking offense, his target enveloped him in a big, American-style hug. Hemon, who came to America at age 28 not knowing English, has been recognized as a brilliant English stylist. His portraits of immigrant dislocation have made him one of the most celebrated members of a talented cohort that includes writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Shteyngart, and Junot D&iacute;az. And this development is faithfully reported in Hemon's fiction: Susie, the relentless dinner guest in <em>The Lazarus Project</em>, rewards Brik's ironic politeness with a huge grant from her foundation—just as, in real life, Hemon has received a MacArthur grant. Hemon's willingness to acknowledge his good fortune and growing fame, without allowing them to dull his edge or mute his self-exposure, is reminiscent of Saul Bellow—who, in <em> <a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inboxhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143105477?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0143105477">Humboldt's Gift</a></em>, had his alter ego joke about the &quot;Pullet Surprise.&quot; </p>
<p>Now, in <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594488649?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=1594488649">Love and Obstacles</a></em>, his fourth book and second collection of stories, Hemon offers another report on his always-evolving, always-mixed feelings about his generous, oblivious adopted country. The unnamed narrator who appears in each of these eight stories is clearly another version of Hemon, and readers of his earlier books will recognize his progress from feckless Bosnian teenager to bewildered new immigrant to tentative celebrity writer. </p>
<p>Hemon explains the book's title in the story &quot;The Conductor,&quot; where the narrator remembers his first hapless attempts at writing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I can confess, now that I've long since stopped writing poetry, that I never really understood what I wrote. I didn't know what my poems were about, but I believed in them. I liked their titles (&quot;Peter Pan and the Lesbians,&quot; &quot;Love and Obstacles,&quot; et cetera) and I felt that they attained a realm of human innocence and experience that was unknowable, even by me. I delayed showing them to anyone else; I was waiting for readers to evolve, I suppose, to the point where they could grasp the vast spaces of my ego.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This kind of exquisite adolescent embarrassment is the keynote of the first stories in the book. It may be a familiar kind of comedy—the grown-up writer looking back, wryly but tenderly, on his literary and romantic follies—but Hemon handles it brilliantly (that expertly timed &quot;even by me&quot;). The opening of the first story is especially clever, as Hemon plunges us into a derivative, overwritten African scene—&quot;The most troubling was the ceaseless roll of the drums: the sonorous, ponderous thudding hovering around me. Whether it meant war, peace or prayer, I could not tell&quot;—only to gradually reveal that this is Africa as seen through the eyes of a Conrad-loving 16-year-old. We know we are in a Hemon story when it turns out that, in fact, the drums are coming from the upstairs apartment, where an expatriate American named Spinelli is playing along to a Led Zeppelin record. </p>
<p>After several more stories unfold, however, it becomes clear that Hemon's real theme, the source of both the love and the obstacles, is America itself. Spinelli is merely the first of the American incarnations that he has to try to puzzle out. Spinelli appears to be a drugged-out loser and fantastist, regaling the young writer (whom he christens &quot;Blunderpuss&quot;) with transparently made-up stories about his exploits as a spy (&quot;sneaking into Angola to help out Savimbi's freedom fighters; training the Ugandan special forces with the Israelis&quot;). Yet to the bored narrator, who is stuck in Kinshasa because his father, a Yugoslav diplomat, was posted there, Spinelli represents the garish privileges of America and adulthood: sex, violence, rock 'n' roll. Only later, when Spinelli turns up in official diplomatic settings and seems to be shadowing the narrator's father, do we start to wonder if he was really such a fantasist after all. From the beginning, Hemon's America presents a double face of adventure and threat.</p>
<p>It is when Hemon's narrator arrives in America that <em>Love and Obstacles</em> exchanges the comedy of adolescence for the more complex and bittersweet emotions that are Hemon's best subjects. He is at his very best in &quot;The Conductor,&quot; in which the narrator meets his old friend Dedo, a famous Bosnian poet who, unlike him, stayed in Sarajevo during the siege and wrote terrible, magnificent poetry about it. Now Dedo is married to an American woman and teaching in Madison, Wis., but there is no way for Americans to appreciate him. The two writers get drunk together, reminiscing about the past, and the narrator is in awe of Dedo's grandeur and suffering. But when they stumble back to his house, his prim American wife sees only a couple of sentimental drunks. &quot;Do you know me? Do you know who am I? I am biggest Bosnian poet alive,&quot; shouts Dedo in broken English. To which his wife replies, &quot;You're a fucking midget is what you are!&quot; </p>
<p>They are both right, of course, and the stories in <em>Love and Obstacles</em> are remarkable for being faithful to both points of view. Hemon shows us the nobility and the absurdity of immigrant life, the cruelty and the openness of American character. He knows both because he is both; and if this in-betweenness makes Hemon a &quot;nowhere man,&quot; his excellent work also suggests that in between may be the best place for a writer to live.</p>Mon, 25 May 2009 10:41:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/05/nowhere_man.htmlAdam Kirsch2009-05-25T10:41:00ZThe secret of Aleksandar Hemon's brilliant satire.ArtsAleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles.&nbsp;2218850Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2218850falsefalsefalseAleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles. Aleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles. Money Made Him Do Ithttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/02/money_made_him_do_it.html
<p> If you get a group of writers together these days, you are guaranteed to hear a lot about death. Not just the deaths of once popular genres, like poetry or the literary novel; those reports have been commonplace for decades, and the practitioners of these arts have more or less gotten used to the obituaries. Now, the worry is that book publishing itself is dying. When a major house like Houghton Mifflin stops buying new manuscripts, the handwriting seems to be on the wall for the whole industry. Even more shocking is the death of the newspaper, which is turning before our eyes from an idle prophecy to an immediate prospect. In the current <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/new-york-times"><em>Atlantic</em></a>, Michael Hirschorn suggests that the <em>New York Times</em> could go out of business as early as May. That is unimaginable, of course—as unimaginable as the sack of Rome must have been until the Goths came over the horizon.</p>
<p> None of these deaths will mean the death of writing. Human beings wrote long before there were newspapers or books or even paper, and they will continue to do so when these have been replaced by pixels and bytes. But something precious may be coming to an end in our lifetimes: the age of the professional writer. For the last three centuries or so, it was possible to make a living, and a name, by writing what the public wanted to read. The novelist, the essayist, the critic, the journalist—all these literary types flourished in that historically brief window, which now appears to be closing. In the future, if fewer people are interested in reading and few of those are willing to pay for what they read, all these kinds of writers may go the way of the troubadour and the scribe.</p>
<p>It is a nice symbolic irony, then, that this year marks the 300<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the greatest professional writer in English literature. &quot;No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,&quot; Samuel Johnson used to say. And while James Boswell, his friend and biographer, hurried to point out that &quot;numerous instances to refute this will occur to all who are versed in the history of literature,&quot; Johnson's dictum does contain an essential truth about the kind of writer he was. </p>
<p>&quot;His character and manners were aggressive, and he saw life itself as a perpetual contest,&quot; writes Jeffrey Meyers in the introduction to his fluent and accessible new biography, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465045715?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0465045715"><em>Samuel Johnson: The Struggle</em></a>. The other new life of Johnson to appear this season, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674031601?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0674031601"><em>Samuel Johnson: A Biography</em></a>, by Peter Martin, is more academic and less literary than Meyers', but it might as well share that combative subtitle. Martin, too, sees Johnson's life as a long &quot;contest&quot; with poverty, sickness, and neurosis—a contest in which Johnson's talent and professionalism allowed him to triumph. </p>
<p>Meyers and Martin tell basically the same story about Johnson's early years. Born in provincial Litchfield, in 1709, he wasn't expected to survive—&quot;I was born almost dead and could not cry for some time,&quot; he once said—and he grew up disfigured and nearly blinded by scrofula. He developed violent tics—both Meyers and Martin venture a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette's syndrome—that made him ridiculous, or even terrifying, in polite company. Novelist Fanny Burney, who became his close friend, remembered her first impression of Johnson: &quot;A Face the most ugly, a Person the most awkward, &amp; manners the most singular, that ever were, or ever can be seen…. He has almost perpetual convulsive motions, either of his Hands, Lips, Feet, Knees, &amp; sometimes all together.&quot; </p>
<p>Johnson's father, a bookseller, never made much money, and in time his business failed completely. Johnson got to spend a year at Oxford, after he came into a small legacy, but the money wasn't enough to keep him there until he could earn a degree. He spent his 20s trying, and largely failing, to find work as a schoolteacher. When Johnson got married at age 26 to 46-year-old widow Elizabeth Porter—whom he called Tetty—he used most of her money to start up a school, which attracted exactly three pupils and closed after 15 months. By the time he set out for London in 1737, with no assets except a play he hoped to get produced, it could not but seem, as Meyers writes, that &quot;his life thus far had been catastrophic.&quot; </p>
<p>But London proved to be Johnson's salvation. He made a connection with the editor of the popular <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> and started to earn a living by hackwork. Soon enough his reputation was made by his satirical poem &quot;London&quot;; his heroic labor on the dictionary, which appeared in 1755, made him famous. Working alone, with just a few assistants, he did for the English language what it had taken the whole Academie Francaise 40 years to accomplish for the French. The terms of the book trade, however, were not generous to the author in the 18<sup>th</sup> century. Johnson spent his fee for the dictionary well before the book was published, and he earned no royalties. This may seem unfair, but as Boswell wrote, &quot;[W]e must, at the same time, congratulate ourselves, when we consider that to this very neglect, operating to rouse the natural indolence of his constitution, we owe many valuable productions, which otherwise, perhaps, might never have appeared.&quot;</p>
<p>&quot;Fame is the spur the clear spirit doth raise/(That last infirmity of noble minds)/To scorn delights and live laborious days,&quot; said Milton. But while Johnson cared about fame, it was simple need—the need to eat and keep a roof over his head—that made him accomplish so much. Over the course of his career, beyond the dictionary, he produced an edition of the complete plays of Shakespeare; an encyclopedic series of <em>Lives of the English Poets</em>; the poem &quot;The Vanity of Human Wishes,&quot; one of the great satires in the language; the moral tale <em>Rasselas</em>, a kind of English <em>Candide</em> (written in one week, Johnson claimed, so that he could pay for his mother's funeral); <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486455548?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0486455548"><em>A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland</em></a>; and the 208 essays of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rambler-Samuel-Johnson/dp/1436586178/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1232035151&amp;sr=1-4"><em>The Rambler</em></a>, which for more than 100 years were known to every well-read person in England and America. And that is not to mention the translations, book reviews, lectures, sermons, parliamentary reports, and assorted journalism.</p>
<p>It was a hard life, both personally and professionally. Johnson was horribly afflicted by depression and anxiety, which his Christian faith could only partly relieve. Until he was granted a modest royal pension, at the age of 53, he was never financially secure, and he knew how precarious a writer's life could be: Many of his friends were imprisoned for debt, and a few actually died of poverty and hunger. After Tetty's death he never remarried, and his sexual life, about which both Meyers and Martin speculate, was probably unhappy. </p>
<p>Only one thing allowed Johnson's &quot;struggle&quot; to end in a victory. That was London's thriving print culture, which allowed a man like Johnson—a man without connections, good looks, or money—to make it as a writer. Being a professional writer allowed, and compelled, him to turn his indolence into industry: to read and learn about every subject imaginable, so that he could write about them; to try his hand at any genre that would sell; to find the demand in the market (for a dictionary or a biography or a periodical) and meet it. </p>
<p>This resourcefulness made Johnson self-sufficient in a way few writers had been earlier, when they looked to aristocratic patrons for support, or are today, when the university and the foundation are the writer's patrons of choice. Reading about his life makes clear that Johnson's hard-won independence was something different from the much-celebrated freedom offered by the Internet, which allows any literate person a platform in the form of a Web site or blog. The democracy of the new medium is a good thing, of course, but like our democratic society itself, the Internet tends to encourage amateurism and atomization. It is hard to see how a writer like Johnson could arise in a future when writing is something done casually, in brief blog bursts in one's spare time. And it may not be long before the kind of professional confidence and expertise that Johnson cultivated over a lifetime of paid work will appear as regrettably obsolete as books and newspapers themselves.&nbsp; </p>Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:19:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/02/money_made_him_do_it.htmlAdam Kirsch2009-02-23T04:19:00ZWhat Samuel Johnson can teach us about writing.ArtsNew biographies of Samuel Johnson.2208759Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2208759falsefalsefalseNew biographies of Samuel Johnson.New biographies of Samuel Johnson.Lessons From the Gilded Agehttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/02/lessons_from_the_gilded_age.html
<p> Appropriately for a book about the impact of Darwinism on 19<sup>th</sup>-century American life, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Banquet-Delmonicos-Triumph-Evolution-America/dp/1400067782/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1232985778&amp;sr=1-1"><em>Banquet at Delmonico's</em></a> has a distinguished intellectual pedigree. In his best-seller <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Club-Story-Ideas-America/dp/0374528497/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1232985940&amp;sr=1-1">The Metaphysical Club</a></em>, Louis Menand wrote a group biography of the thinkers and teachers who made Pragmatism the quasi-official philosophy of post-Civil War America. That book proved what Darwin might have called its literary &quot;fitness&quot; by winning the Pulitzer Prize; so it is only appropriate that now, eight years later, it has produced a kind of offspring in Barry Werth's new book.</p>
<p>Werth, too, is drawn to the Gilded Age, that ruthless forcing-house of modern American capitalism, and to the apparently recondite philosophical debates that helped form the character of the age. His title refers to a once famous, now forgotten event that might be considered the apotheosis of Social Darwinism in America. On the evening of Nov. 8, 1882, some 200 of the country's best and brightest gathered at Delmonico's restaurant, at Fifth Avenue and 26<sup>th</sup> Street in New York City, to raise a glass to Herbert Spencer, the philosopher who coined the phrase &quot;survival of the fittest&quot; and transformed the theory of evolution from a biological hypothesis into an all-powerful explanation of human society, history, and psychology. </p>
<p>Spencer is little-read today, now that Social Darwinism—the doctrine with which his name is always, though not quite fairly, associated—looks less like the science of the future than the ideological self-justification of a rapacious and racist society. But that evening at Delmonico's, Spencer could be forgiven if he imagined himself the most brilliant human being who had ever walked the earth. As the querulous, sickly philosopher listened, William Evarts—whose career included stints as attorney general, secretary of state, and U.S. senator from New York—announced that &quot;in theology, in psychology, in natural science, in the knowledge of individual man … we acknowledge your labors as surpassing those of any of our kind.&quot; Carl Schurz, a Civil War general and Republican reform politician, called Spencer &quot;one of the great teachers, not merely of a school, but of civilized humanity.&quot; Henry Ward Beecher, celebrity pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church, confessed that Spencer's works &quot;have been meat and bread to me. … [I]f I had the fortune of a millionaire, and I should pour all my gold at his feet, it would be no sort of compensation compared with what I believe I owe him.&quot;</p>
<p>It was, in short, one of those orgies of self-congratulation in which the Victorians, in America as in England, so delighted. Spencer believed that human society was inevitably progressing toward a perfect future; as apes were to humans, so 19<sup>th</sup>-century Anglo-American democracy was to the coming utopia. The louder they sang his praises, the surer Spencer's admirers could feel that they were on the cutting edge of history—that their wealth, power, and racial privilege were not the fruits of luck or exploitation but the marks of election. </p>
<p>This complacency was what made it possible for Beecher to assure his congregants that they should not worry about workers who earned just $1 a day: &quot;Was not a dollar a day enough to buy bread? Water costs nothing. … A family may live on good bread and water in the morning, water and bread at midday, and good bread and water at night.&quot; The well-heeled Brooklynites greeted this homily with laughter, Werth reports, and surely they would not have laughed less if they had known that Henry &quot;Bread and Water&quot; Beecher, as labor leaders started to call him, earned $1,000 per speech on the lecture circuit. Traditionally, a Christian minister might be expected to remind his flock that the poor in spirit are blessed, that it was harder for a rich man to go to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. But a modern preacher, steeped in the doctrine of evolution, could turn this message on its head: The rich and strong would inherit the earth, while the meek went extinct.</p>
<p>The irony was that this complacency rested on a complete misunderstanding of Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwinian evolution is anti-teleological—a mindless process with no goal or direction. Yes, evolution gave rise to complex animals like human beings, but it would be a mistake to say that humans are &quot;higher&quot; creatures than apes in any moral sense: All living things are equally &quot;successful&quot; insofar as they manage to reproduce themselves. The whole thrust of Spencer's thought, on the other hand, was that, in the words of his American disciple and popularizer Edward Youmans, &quot;life, mind, man, science, art, language, morality, society, government, and institutions are things that have undergone a gradual and continuous unfolding, and can be explained in no other way but by a theory of growth and derivation.&quot; </p>
<p>Oddly, <em>Banquet at Delmonico's</em> never really offers a clear explanation of Spencer's views on social evolution and the ways they differed from Darwin's understanding of biology. (Spencer himself recognized the difference and even insisted on it: He was always reminding people that he came up with his version of evolution years before <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-150th-Anniversary/dp/0451529065/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1232986228&amp;sr=1-1">The Origin of Species</a></em> appeared in 1859.) Werth is more interested in anecdotes than ideas, and he devotes much more space to Spencer's rambling letters about his health problems than to his philosophical work. </p>
<p>Yet this lingering confusion is also oddly appropriate, since, as Werth shows, Gilded Age intellectuals themselves often used terms like <em>evolution</em> and <em>positivism</em> with no clear sense of what they really meant. As with so many intellectual buzzwords, from <em>transcendentalism</em> to <em>deconstruction</em>, <em>evolution</em> was not so much the name of an idea as a badge of identity. If you believed in it, you were on the side of science and progress; if you attacked it, you were superstitious or reactionary. Noah Porter, the president of Yale, set off the nation's first battle over academic freedom when he forbade a young professor from using Spencer's <em>The Study of Sociology</em> as a textbook on the grounds that it was &quot;substantially atheistic.&quot; </p>
<p>All this, of course, has a weirdly contemporary feel. The kind of opposition that the theory of evolution provoked in the 19<sup>th</sup> century—passionate, personal, and wholly unscientific—it continues to provoke today. The difference is that now, no Yale president would be caught dead banning a book for being atheistic. The whole religious, scientific, and intellectual establishment is behind Darwinism now, and the only opposition comes from the margins—from religious fundamentalists and small-town school boards. Yet Werth's book reminds us that, in the past, the &quot;progressive&quot; doctrine of Darwinism authorized a very reactionary politics—culminating in the eugenics movement and the forced sterilization of unfit mothers. It is worth remembering that the most advanced members of society, intellectually speaking, are not always the wisest or the best.</p>Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:53:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/02/lessons_from_the_gilded_age.htmlAdam Kirsch2009-02-09T11:53:00ZWhat Social Darwinists didn't get about evolution.ArtsBarry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's.2210293Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2210293falsefalsefalseBarry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's.Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's.The Secret of The Canterbury Taleshttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2008/12/the_secret_of_the_canterbury_tales.html
<p> A confirmed sadist could find many things to enjoy in the pages of <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679643559?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0679643559"><em>The Canterbury Tales</em></a></em>. As Chaucer's pilgrims take turns telling stories to while away the hours on their long walk to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, they shy away from no variety of physical violation or psychological torture. In &quot;The Miller's Tale,&quot; a man is rectally impaled with a red-hot poker. In &quot;The Clerk's Tale,&quot; a husband tests his wife's obedience by pretending to murder their two children. In &quot;The Reeve's Tale,&quot; a pair of students rapes a man's wife and daughter in order to humiliate him.</p>
<p>Why is it, then, that the actual experience of reading <em>The Canterbury Tales</em> is not at all painful? Why has it struck six centuries of readers as, in fact, the humane masterpiece of English literature—the book that seems to embrace more of the world, and affirm more of human nature, than any other? The answer lies in the disjunction between the men and women who populate Chaucer's poem and the stories that they tell. In their tales, the pilgrims reflect the assumptions of a medieval world that manages to appear, at the same time, inhumane in its love of comic brutality and sanctimonious in the way it elevates piety, humility, and (especially female) chastity into the highest virtues. Who would want to live as austerely as Chaucer's Pardoner demands from the pulpit?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>O gluttony, the height of wickedness!<br />O primal cause of mankind's utter fall!<br />O first and original sin that damned us all<br />Till Christ redeemed us with his own dear blood! ...<br />O stomach! O belly! O stinking bag of jelly,<br />Filled with dung, and reeking with corruption!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet by the time the reader reaches these lines from &quot;The Pardoner's Tale&quot;—as rendered, here, by Burton Raffel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679643559?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0679643559">in his new translation of Chaucer from Middle to Modern English</a>—she has already learned not to trust a word this character says. For in real life, the Pardoner—or, as Raffel derisively calls him, the &quot;Pardon-Peddler&quot;—is himself a first-class glutton, not to mention a lecher and a con artist. &quot;I want good money, good clothes and cheese and wheat/… I like to water my throat with wine,/ And have a frisky wench in every town,&quot; the Pardoner brags in the prologue that precedes his tale. He is so brazen that the reader has to laugh, especially when he reveals the trick that always gets people to pay for the privilege of genuflecting before his faked relics. He announces to the congregation that &quot;Anyone in sitting in church, cozy and warm,/ Guilty of several sins so awful he/ Dares not, for shame, confess and pray for mercy,&quot; is strictly forbidden to make an offering. After that, of course, no one wants to be seen holding back.</p>
<p>&quot;In real life,&quot; I wrote, the Pardoner is not what he seems in his tale—yet of course there is no &quot;in real life&quot; when it comes to the pilgrims, who are all Chaucer's inventions. Indeed, the pilgrims are far more Chaucer's inventions than the stories they tell, which are usually recycled from other medieval tale collections. Yet it is precisely by building this second level, this metafiction, into his fiction that Chaucer renders it so powerfully realistic. Because we see the pilgrims telling stories, they gain the trust we place in storytellers, who, by definition, are more real than their tales.</p>
<p>And it is in the gap between the tellers and the tales that Chaucer's humanity is able to flourish. The Clerk might offer up Griselda, the wife who is unswervingly loyal despite her husband's cruelty, as a model of Christian patience: &quot;A woman having been incredibly patient/ To a mortal man, how very much more we ought/ To take in good part whatever God has sent us,/ For rightfully he tests what he has wrought. …&quot; Yet at the end of that tale, Chaucer adds a song or &quot;envoy,&quot; gleefully acknowledging that &quot;Griselda is dead, and so too is her patience,&quot; so that husbands should not try to find her like: &quot;They'd only be wasting their time, and deserve their penance.&quot; </p>
<p>More important, Chaucer creates the Wife of Bath, that irresistible emblem of female independence and appetite, to display &quot;in real life&quot; a charisma that the &quot;fictional&quot; Griselda could never match. Griselda is the kind of woman that only exists in stories written by &quot;clerks,&quot; that is, clergymen, as the Wife complains: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no greater impossibility,<br />In truth, than clerics praising wives would be,<br />Unless the woman is a holy saint:<br />No other women deserve a word of praise.<br />Pictures of lion-killing show a living<br />Man. But what if a lion had painted the picture?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Wife of Bath's fifth husband, she recounts, had a book full of misogynistic stories from sacred and pagan literature; tired of hearing them, she &quot;yanked three pages out of the book/ And threw them onto the floor, and also hit him/ Right on the cheek, hard, with my balled-up fist.&quot; The secret of <em>The Canterbury Tales</em> is that it allows its characters to tear out its own pages, so to speak—to mock and complain about the rules they are supposed to live by. Because of this, the book has a holiday air, a tolerance for human appetites and frailties, that few modern works can rival. Our officially secular and hedonistic society seldom allows us to feel as free and happy as Chaucer's pilgrims seem to be.</p>
<p>All the passages I have quoted come from Burton Raffel's new translation, and they show its one big virtue: It is immediately comprehensible, allowing the reader to grasp (most of) Chaucer's meaning without footnotes. For those readers who are absolutely unwilling to puzzle out Middle English spelling, or spend time getting acquainted with Chaucer's versification and syntax, Raffel's edition will be a useful substitute.</p>
<p>But even Raffel, a poet who has translated everyone from Cervantes to Stendhal, seems a little curious why anyone would bother reading <em>The Canterbury Tales</em> in translation. &quot;Native speakers of English, as recently as the first half of the twentieth century, were not particularly uncomfortable with Chaucer's difficulties,&quot; he writes in his introduction. Since the English language has not changed much in the last&nbsp;50 years, he clearly believes that the problem lies with its speakers—that we have gotten lazier and more provincial.</p>
<p>No one who embarks on reading <em>The Canterbury Tales</em>, however, can be all that lazy, and any reader who compares the original with Raffel's version will surely agree that the extra effort is worthwhile. For Raffel's translation loses the original's music without finding a music of its own; he is wordy where the original is pithy and bare where the original is lush. Chaucer is in many ways the progenitor of English fiction—he is closer to Dickens than to Keats—but he is also a great master of English poetry; and since poetry is what is lost in translation, why not take the trouble to read the original and avoid the loss? Besides, as the Pardoner says, &quot;lewed peple loven tales olde;/ Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde.&quot;</p>Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:38:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2008/12/the_secret_of_the_canterbury_tales.htmlAdam Kirsch2008-12-29T11:38:00ZThe tellers get to mock their own tales.ArtsBurton Raffel's Chaucer translation.2206762Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2206762falsefalsefalseBurton Raffel's Chaucer translation.Burton Raffel's Chaucer translation.Slouching Towards Santa Teresahttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2008/11/slouching_towards_santa_teresa.html
<p> According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly. Only minor writers write beautifully, since they simply reflect back to us our preconceived notion of what beauty is; we have no problem understanding what they are up to, since we have seen it many times before. When a writer is truly original, his failure to be conventionally beautiful makes us see him, initially, as shapeless, awkward, or perverse. Only once we have learned how to read him do we realize that this ugliness is really a new, totally unexpected kind of beauty and that what seemed wrong in his writing is exactly what makes him great.</p>
<p>By this standard, there is no doubt that Roberto Bola&ntilde;o is a great writer. <em>2666</em>, the enormous novel he had almost completed when he died at 50 in 2003, has the confident strangeness of a masterpiece: In almost every particular, it fails, or refuses, to conform to our expectations of what a novel should be. For one thing, though it is being published as a single work (in a Bible-sized single-volume edition and as a three-paperback set), <em>2666</em> is made up of five sections that are so independent Bola&ntilde;o originally planned to release them as separate books. These parts relate to one another, not as installments or sequels but, rather, as five planets orbiting the same sun. With their very different stories and settings, they seem to describe a single plummeting arc—the trajectory of a universe on the verge of apocalypse.</p>
<p>It is a shame for a reviewer to have to reveal even the outlines of these stories: The best way to experience <em>2666</em> is without warning, as in a dream in which you find yourself on a road that could lead absolutely anywhere. Like many such dreams, or nightmares, the first section of the novel, &quot;The Part About the Critics,&quot; starts quite undramatically, as Bola&ntilde;o introduces us to four literary scholars from different European countries who are all interested in the work of an obscure German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi. Bola&ntilde;o follows the evolving romantic intrigues among the scholars—three men and a woman—and gives hints about the strange career of Archimboldi, who has lived through the 20<sup>th</sup> century as an almost complete recluse. Suddenly, improbably, the critics learn that Archimboldi has been spotted in northern Mexico, and three of them go to the border city of Santa Teresa to look for him.</p>
<p>From then on, Santa Teresa becomes the novel's center of gravity. When the first part of <em>2666</em> ends, the critics vanish from its pages, never to return. Instead, Bola&ntilde;o devotes the second section, &quot;The Part About Amalfitano,&quot; to a virtuosic character study of a Mexican professor who is slowly going mad. Amalfitano had appeared briefly in the previous section as one of the European critics' guides to Santa Teresa, but nothing about the character suggested that Bola&ntilde;o would devote so much attention to him. Likewise, in the third section, Amalfitano leaves the stage for good, and we are introduced instead to Oscar Fate, a black American journalist who comes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match and happens to meet the mad professor's daughter.</p>
<p>Finally, with the fourth section, &quot;The Part About the Crimes,&quot; Bola&ntilde;o starts to make clear why all of his disparate plots have converged on this ugly, ramshackle, provincial city. The rumors about <em>2666</em> that have filtered through to the English-speaking world, in the years since it was published in Spanish to wild acclaim, often described it as being &quot;about&quot; the real-life epidemic of murders of women in Ciudad Ju&aacute;rez. While this is a great oversimplification, it is true that the fourth section of <em>2666</em> is an almost journalistic account of that long-running crime wave. Bola&ntilde;o rebaptizes Ju&aacute;rez as Santa Teresa and moves the city from the El Paso, Texas, border to the Tucson, Ariz., border, but the underlying facts are the same. Since 1993, hundreds of women have disappeared, sometimes to resurface as horribly violated corpses, sometimes without a trace, and the police seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it.</p>
<p>What makes Bola&ntilde;o's narration of these crimes so characteristic, and transforms it from pulpy true-crime writing to something like fiction, is, paradoxically, his total refusal to imagine his way into the murders. He does not take advantage of the novelist's privilege of going anywhere—into the mind of the victim as she suffers or of the killer as he kills. On the contrary, the eeriness of Bola&ntilde;o's account lies in its complete exteriority, the deadened affect of its relentless cataloging of deaths:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the middle of November the body of another dead woman was discovered in the Podesta ravine. She had multiple fractures of the skull, with loss of brain matter. Some marks on the body indicated that she had put up a struggle. She was found with her pants down around her knees, by which it was assumed that she'd been raped, although after a vaginal swab was taken this hypothesis was discarded. Five days later the dead woman was identified. She was Luisa Cardona Pardo, thirty-four, from the state of Sinaloa, where she had worked as a prostitute from the age of seventeen. She had been living in Santa Teresa for four years and she was employed at the EMSA maquiladora.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Imagine reading case reports like these, one after another, for almost 300 pages, and you will get a sense of the bludgeoning effect of &quot;The Part About the Crimes.&quot; The violence becomes simultaneously banal and unbearable in its sheer reiteration; at times, it requires a real effort to keep turning the pages. Yet in this way, Bola&ntilde;o succeeds in restoring to physical violence something of its genuine evil, in a time when readers in the First World are used to experiencing it only as <em>CSI</em>-style entertainment.</p>
<p>At the same time, Bola&ntilde;o manages to suggest that the violence in Santa Teresa is something much more than a local crime wave. One of the characters who looms into individuality, out of the anonymous crowd of the dead, is Klaus Haas, a German-born American citizen who is imprisoned by the Mexican police as a scapegoat for the murders. He may or may not have killed a woman—Bola&ntilde;o never lets us know for sure—but he is certainly not &quot;the Santa Teresa killer,&quot; if only because the murders continue after he is arrested. Yet when Sergio Gonzales, a journalist reporting on his case, calls Haas in jail, Bola&ntilde;o writes that over the phone line he &quot;heard the sound of the desert and something like the tread of an animal.&quot; It is an understated but clear allusion to Yeats' &quot;The Second Coming,&quot; where the poet sees &quot;somewhere in sands of the desert/ A shape with lion body and the head of a man,&quot; and asks, &quot;what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?&quot; </p>
<p>In this indirect fashion, Bola&ntilde;o hints that Haas is, if not an anti-Christ, at least a sign of the times: a beast whose advent signals some cosmic realignment. It is just one of countless moments in <em>2666</em> that suggest the metaphysical dimension of Bola&ntilde;o's vision. The attentive reader will be reminded of a remark by a minor character in the novel's third section, some&nbsp;200 pages earlier: &quot;No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.&quot; And then she might remember a strange dream that Espinoza, one of the critics, had in Part 1, in which &quot;he could see the still, bright desert, such a solar yellow it hurt his eyes, and the figures on horseback, whose movements—the movements of horses and riders—were barely perceptible, as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched from losing his mind.&quot; </p>
<p>Time and again, Bola&ntilde;o hints, without ever quite saying, that what is happening in Santa Teresa is a symptom of a universal derangement in which hidden dimensions of reality are coming horribly to light. That is why so much of the activity of <em>2666</em> takes place not along the ordinary novelistic axes of plot and character but on the poetic, even mystical planes of symbol and metaphor. It is in Bola&ntilde;o's allusions and unexplained coincidences, in his character's frequent, vividly disturbing dreams, in the mad recitations of criminals and preachers and witches—above all, in the dark insights of Benno von Archimboldi, who finally takes center stage in the book's fifth section—that the real story of <em>2666 </em>gets told. That is one reason why the book is so hard to summarize—and why Natasha Wimmer's lucid, versatile translation is so triumphant. <em>2666</em> is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve.</p>Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:15:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2008/11/slouching_towards_santa_teresa.htmlAdam Kirsch2008-11-03T11:15:00ZRoberto Bola&ntilde;o's utterly strange masterpiece.ArtsRoberto Bola&ntilde;o's 2666.2203471Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2203471falsefalsefalseRoberto Bolaño's 2666.Roberto Bolaño's 2666.Nobel Gashttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/10/nobel_gas.html
<p>When Saul Bellow learned that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, he reacted to the news in the only way a great writer can or should: He tried hard not to care. &quot;I'm glad to get it,&quot; Bellow admitted, but &quot;I could live without it.&quot; This month, as the Swedish Academy prepares for its annual announcement, Bellow's heirs in the top ranks of American literature—Roth, Updike, Pynchon, DeLillo—already know they're going to&nbsp;live without the Nobel Prize. Horace Engdahl, the academy's permanent secretary, made that clear this week when he told the Associated Press that American writers are simply not up to Nobel standards. &quot;The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,&quot; Engdahl decreed. &quot;They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.&quot; </p>
<p>It did not take long for American writers to rise to the bait. The <em>Washington Post</em>'s Michael Dirda pointed out that it was Engdahl who displayed &quot;an insular attitude towards a very diverse country&quot;: It is a bit rich for a citizen of Sweden, whose population of 9 million is about the same as New York City's, to call the United States &quot;isolated.&quot; David Remnick noted that the Swedish Academy itself has been guilty of conspicuous ignorance over a very long period: &quot;You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.&quot; </p>
<p>All of these criticisms are, of course, true. But the real scandal of Engdahl's comments is not that they revealed a secret bias on the part of the Swedish Academy. It is that Engdahl made official what has long been obvious to anyone paying attention: The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature. America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become.</p>
<p>When Engdahl accuses American writers of being raw and backward, of not being up-to-date on the latest developments in Paris or Berlin, he is repeating a stereotype that goes back practically to the Revolutionary War. It was nearly 200 years ago that Sydney Smith, the English wit, famously wrote in the <em>Edinburgh Review</em>: &quot;In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?&quot; Ironically, though, while Engdahl decries American provincialism today, for most of the Nobel's history, it was exactly its &quot;backwardness&quot; that the Nobel committee most valued in American literature. </p>
<p>Just look at the kind of American writer the committee has chosen to honor. Pearl Buck, who won the prize in 1938, and John Steinbeck, who won in 1962, are almost folk writers, using a naively realist style to dramatize the struggles of the common man. Their most famous books, <em>The Good Earth</em> and <em>The Grapes of Wrath</em>, fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading lists. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Prize, in 1930, wrote broad satires on American provincialism with nothing formally adventurous about them. </p>
<p>Such writers reflected back to Europe just the image of America they wanted to see: earnest, crude, anti-intellectual. There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. <a>But </a> in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate (not counting writers from other countries who became American citizens) <a href="http://www.slate.com#correction">*</a>, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe. </p>
<p>But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe's backwater—as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel—it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn't exist. When Engdahl declares, &quot;You can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,&quot; there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in <em>Sunset Boulevard</em> insisting that she is still big, it's the pictures that got smaller. </p>
<p>Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl's claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn't think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous. </p>
<p>What does distinguish the Nobel Committee's favorites, however, is a pronounced anti-Americanism. Pinter used the occasion of his Nobel lecture in 2005 to say that &quot;the crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless&quot; and to call for &quot;Bush and Blair [to] be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.&quot; Doris Lessing, who won the prize last year, gave an interview dismissing the Sept. 11 attacks as &quot;neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as [Americans] think,&quot; adding: &quot;They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be.&quot; </p>
<p>It would be nice to think that the Swedish Academy was not endorsing such views when they selected Pinter and Lessing or the similarly inclined Jos&eacute; Saramago and G&uuml;nter Grass. But to prove the bad faith of Engdahl's recent criticisms of American literature, all you have to do is mention a single name: Philip Roth. Engdahl accuses Americans of not &quot;participating in the big dialogue of literature,&quot; but no American writer has been more cosmopolitan than Roth. As editor of Penguin's &quot;Writers From the Other Europe&quot; series, he was responsible for introducing many of Eastern Europe's great writers to America, from Danilo Kiš &nbsp;to Witold Gombrowicz; his 2001 nonfiction book <em>Shop Talk</em> includes interviews with Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima, and Primo Levi. In his own fiction, too, Roth has been as adventurously Postmodern as Calvino while also making room for the kind of detailed realism that has long been a strength of American literature. Unless and until Roth gets the Nobel Prize, there's no reason for Americans to pay attention to any insults from the Swedes.</p>
<p><strong> <a><em>Correction</em></a><em>, Oct. 9, 2008</em></strong><em>: This article originally stated that there has been exactly one American laureate since Bellow won the Nobel in 1976. In fact, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czesław Miłosz, and Joseph Brodsky have all won Nobels since then. (</em> <a href="http://www.slate.com#return"><em>Return</em></a><em> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:10:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/10/nobel_gas.htmlAdam Kirsch2008-10-03T16:10:00ZThe Swedes have no clue about American literature.ArtsThe Nobel Committee has no clue about American literature.2201447Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2201447falsefalsefalseThe Nobel Committee has no clue about American literature.The Nobel Committee has no clue about American literature.The Odysseyhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2004/11/the_odyssey.html
<p> It's rare for poets to get better as they get older. Some of the most famous poems in English were written by people in their 20s—think of Keats' &quot;Ode to a Nightingale,&quot; or Eliot's &quot;The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.&quot; Even when great poets do keep writing into old age, they seldom improve on their early work—no one has ever preferred Wordsworth's &quot;Ecclesiastical Sonnets&quot; to his &quot;Lyrical Ballads.&quot; Only in a few cases—most famously in the last century, W.B. Yeats—does a poet get better with each successive decade.</p>
<p>Now Derek Walcott has to be added to that short list. The <em>Collected Poems </em>of Walcott found in most bookstores includes his work up to 1984, when he was 54; but in the 20 years since, he has written better and more beautifully than ever before. Now, in his new book-length poem <em>The Prodigal</em>—which he tells himself, hopefully in error, &quot;will be your last book&quot;—we have the quintessence of what could be called Late Walcott. The book purifies and summarizes the style and the subjects he has treated so many times over a long career. Here we find the Caribbean childhood he wrote about in <em>Another Life</em> (1973) and the peripatetic life of <em>The Fortunate Traveller </em>(1981); the long, cascading lines he perfected in <em>Midsummer </em>(1984) and <em>The Bounty </em>(1997); and the visual enchantment that has pervaded his poetry from the beginning but culminated in <em>Tiepolo's Hound </em>(2000). <em>The Prodigal </em>is like the last movement of a symphony in which all the earlier themes return, transformed by memory and tinged with melancholy. </p>
<p>If there's one thing most people know about Walcott, it's that he is a Caribbean poet. <em>Omeros, </em>his long recasting of the <em>Iliad </em>on the shores of his native St. Lucia, has become a popular assignment in college courses, a nearly textbook example of postcolonial literature—a writer from the former provinces of an empire reclaiming and transforming the imperial myths. (In Walcott's variation on the Homeric story, Helen works in the Caribbean tourist trade: &quot;She braided the tourists' flaxen hair with bright beads/ cane-row style,&quot; and her rival suitors, Achille and Hector, are fishermen.) This is part of Walcott's achievement, and an important one: &quot;I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy,/ filched as the slum child stole,&quot; he once wrote. But in his late work the opposition between empire and province—and, inevitably, between black and white—has become more complicated and ambiguous. </p>
<p>In the first decades of his career, a large part of Walcott's ambition was to bring his native place into literature for the first time. Many of his early poems aim to show that the Caribbean—its people and landscape and language—belongs in English poetry no less than England itself. But eventually life took Walcott away from the Caribbean: For decades he made his home in Boston and New York, and the experience that fueled his work became international. The same goes for his reputation: A writer who wins the Nobel Prize, as Walcott did in 1992, no longer has to prove that he belongs to literature; literature belongs to him.</p>
<p>The paradoxical result of this success, as the title of <em>The Prodigal </em>suggests, is that Walcott now feels at home everywhere and nowhere. The poem is the record of a journey—or, since it has no real beginning or end, of a wandering, a self-imposed exile. In the Caribbean, watching a tribal sacrifice, he feels that &quot;your pale feet cannot keep time/ feel no communion with its celebrants.&quot; But he is equally suspicious of the splendid cities of Europe: &quot;And why waste all that envy when they take/ as much pride in their suffering as in their cathedrals,&quot; he asks. Finally, Walcott seems to feel that his only real home is poetry, language itself. This helps to explain his fondness for metaphors that turn the whole world into a poem: Traveling in Italy, he declares, &quot;Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace,/ and the olive trees twisted as Ovid's syntax.&quot; </p>
<p>If the whole world is a poem, then the poet doesn't need subjects in the usual sense; he becomes like a sponge, soaking up poetry as he lives, sees, and travels. Increasingly in his recent work, Walcott has had less and less use for subjects and occasions; all of his poems have come to seem like parts of one long poem, which is his life itself. This tendency is brought to perfection in <em>The Prodigal</em>, where there is not so much a plot as a continuous provocation to verse: a conversation on a train, a hotel lobby, a Swiss Alp, a Caribbean beach, are all woven together in a single tapestry. And Walcott's late style reflects this habit of mind: He favors very long sentences, full of conjunctions and relative clauses,&nbsp;which run across many lines of verse. Each thought or observation prolongs itself into a series: One typical passage employs a cloud, a page, a barge, a shovel, flowers, leaves, and libraries as parts of a single metaphor. This style, rich to overflowing, might make <em>The Prodigal </em>a frustrating book for readers new to Walcott; his late style takes some getting used to. But for readers who know and love the work of the man who deserves to be called the greatest living poet writing in English, <em>The Prodigal </em>will seem like a fitting culmination to a life's work:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Be happy; you're writing from the privilege<br />of all your wits about you in your old age,<br />under the thorn acacias by the noon sea,<br />the light on all the places you have painted<br />and hope to paint with the strenuous accuracy<br />of joy. ...</p>
</blockquote>Mon, 29 Nov 2004 11:47:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2004/11/the_odyssey.htmlAdam Kirsch2004-11-29T11:47:00ZDerek Walcott, the greatest living English-language poet.ArtsThe prodigal Derek Walcott.2110117Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2110117falsefalsefalseThe prodigal Derek Walcott.The prodigal Derek Walcott.Marlowe in the Parkhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/06/marlowe_in_the_park.html
<p> How would we remember Shakespeare if he had died at 29? His career as a playwright would have lasted only a few years, starting in 1590 with the crude popular success <em>The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster</em> (now known as <em>Henry VI, Part II</em>). His last and best play would probably have been <em>Richard II</em>; scholars would study the fantastically violent <em>Titus Andronicus</em> and the intellectual burlesque <em>Love's Labour's Lost</em>. But the creations that make Shakespeare Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet; Falstaff and Hal; Hamlet, Lear—would be lost forever. Shakespeare would take his place as the second most promising of the Elizabethan dramatists—behind his exact contemporary, the prodigious Christopher Marlowe.</p>
<p>In reality, of course, it was Marlowe who died at 29, leaving behind only seven plays, while Shakespeare lived to the ripe old age of 52. Marlowe's reputation is further shadowed by the fact that Shakespeare deliberately re-imagined each of his major plays (in an act of &quot;anxiety of influence&quot; much studied by Harold Bloom), reducing Marlowe's works to the unhappy status of precursors. Yet as the new Penguin Classics edition of his plays shows, Marlowe was far more than a failed or forestalled Shakespeare. He was an entirely different kind of writer: narrower and less gifted than Shakespeare (who wasn't?), but for that very reason more pungently personal. To read Shakespeare is to enter a universe; to read Marlowe is to meet an individual human being.</p>
<p>To put it another way, Marlowe himself seems like a character out of Shakespeare—a real-life Hamlet, or perhaps Iago. Certainly his life, from the little that is known about it, was almost preposterously dramatic. Born on February 26, 1564, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, he earned a scholarship to Cambridge in 1581; he would remain there, on and off, for six years, more than a fifth of his life. Like the courtier Baldock in his <em>Edward II</em>, Marlowe could claim, &quot;my gentry/I fetched from Oxford, not from heraldry.&quot;</p>
<p>In the &quot;off&quot; years, however, Marlowe was pursuing a time-honored hobby of bright young British academics: He was a secret agent, serving Queen Elizabeth's minister Walsingham as a spy on the Continent. When Cambridge threatened to withhold his degree on the suspicion that he was preparing to flee to the Catholic seminary at Rheims—a defection no less serious in the 16<sup>th</sup> century than Kim Philby's to Moscow during the Cold War—the Privy Council itself intervened. Marlowe's sojourns among the Catholics, it assured the university, were &quot;in matters touching the benefit of his country.&quot; No wonder that when Marlowe was murdered in a Deptford tavern in 1593 there was speculation that the government was getting rid of a man who knew too much.</p>
<p>Add to the intellectual and the spy Marlowe the heretic, and the legend is complete. Ten days before his death, Marlowe answered a summons to explain why he was in possession of blasphemous pamphlets. Three days after he was murdered, an informer named Richard Baines wrote the famous &quot;Baines note,&quot; testifying that he had heard Marlowe utter various blasphemies. These were a mixture of adolescent naughtiness—&quot;That St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and ... used him as the sinners of Sodoma&quot;—and proto-Nietzschean contempt: &quot;That the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe.&quot;</p>
<p>Marlowe's outsized legend would not survive, however, were it not for the plays that complete and transcend it. Unlike the Protean Shakespeare, Marlowe did not share out his intelligence equally among his characters. Instead, each of his five great plays—<em>Tamburlaine the Great </em>Parts One and Two, <em>The Jew of Malta</em>, <em>Doctor Faustus</em>, and <em>Edward II</em>—is dominated by a single figure, all very like their creator: charismatic, unscrupulous, and titanically ambitious. Like Milton's Satan, Marlowe's heroes compel awe, and even a sneaking respect, simply because of their superhuman pride. It makes sense that Marlowe's plots are rudimentary, often no more than a series of tableaux. His plays are designed not as imitations of life, but as echo chambers for their heroes' magnificent rhetoric. </p>
<p><em>Doctor Faustus </em>is Marlowe's best play: Faustus is the closest of all his characters to Marlowe himself, an intellectual hungry for real power. Even when he has the Devil at his command, Faustus' fantasies are those of the lifelong student: He wants to know about astronomy and geography, to hear Homer recite the <em>Iliad</em>, to see Helen and Alexander face to face. When Shakespeare came along and transformed Faustus into Hamlet—another tormented graduate of the University of Wittenberg—he turned Marlowe's specialist into a generalist, the typical modern man. Yet it is Faustus who keeps the purity of the archetype and has inspired so many later writers' parables of the modern intellectual, from Goethe to Thomas Mann.</p>
<p>In a sense, all Marlowe's heroes are versions of Faust: Each sells his soul in order to attain the infinite, to transcend all limitations. The glory and the danger of that transaction are what bring Marlowe's plays to life, even when their plots are monotonously gruesome. In a sense, the plays are best read as lyric poems, various expressions of the same sensibility. Barabas, the murderous Jew of Malta (greatly deepened by Shakespeare's Shylock in <em>The Merchant of Venice</em>), yearnns for &quot;infinite riches in a little room.&quot; Mortimer, the usurper in <em>Edward II</em>, brags that &quot;I stand as Jove's huge tree,/ And others are but shrubs compared to me&quot;; when he is finally brought low, he shrugs it off, since &quot;seeing there was no place to mount up higher,/ Why should I grieve at my declining fall?&quot;</p>
<p>But the most simply, brutally Marlovian of all his heroes is Tamburlaine. The first part of the garishly violent <em>Tamburlaine the Great </em>was a breakthrough hit—a sobering glimpse of the taste of Elizabethan audiences, since even a Tarantino movie would have a hard time competing with its repetitive sadism. (When the captured emperor Bajazeth complains that he is starving to death, Tamburlaine tells him: &quot;I will make thee slice the brawns of thy arms … and eat them.&quot;) Yet beneath the torture and butchery, <em>Tamburlaine </em>is the story of a man like Marlowe who is born with nothing, demands everything, and nearly gets it. Kingship, in this play, is not a political institution but a metaphor for human perfection:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend<br />The wondrous architecture of the world<br />And measure every wand'ring planet's course,<br />Still climbing after knowledge infinite<br />And always moving as the restless spheres,<br />Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest<br />Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,<br />That perfect bliss and sole felicity,<br />The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a black irony worthy of his own plays that it was the reticent Shakespeare, and not the vaunting Marlowe, who finally won that &quot;earthly crown.&quot;</p>Thu, 17 Jun 2004 19:00:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/06/marlowe_in_the_park.htmlAdam Kirsch2004-06-17T19:00:00ZThe playwright who helped make Shakespeare.ArtsThe playwright who helped make Shakespeare.2102559Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2102559falsefalsefalseThe playwright who helped make Shakespeare.The playwright who helped make Shakespeare.Marlowe: It's all about me ...The Star, the Born-Again Sinner, and the Gangsterhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2004/03/the_star_the_bornagain_sinner_and_the_gangster.html
<p> Americans may explain themselves to themselves more than any people on earth. Ever since Emerson and Whitman, our native writers have come back to the old questions: What is an American? How are we different from our ancestors in Europe or Africa or Asia? And why can't we come to a conclusive answer after centuries of asking?</p>
<p>One of the best answers was offered 73 years ago in Constance Rourke's <em>American Humor: A Study of the National Character</em>.<em></em>Rourke's is one of those books that is always being rediscovered. First published in 1931, it was issued in paperback in 1971 and reissued in 1986; and now it is available to another generation of readers, in a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590170792/qid=1080767633/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-0544581-9659310?v=glance&amp;s=books&amp;n=507846">new edition introduced by Greil Marcus</a>. Rourke was a pioneer of what was not yet called &quot;cultural studies&quot; and enjoys a cult status among critics and writers, but she deserves a much wider audience—especially now, when endless books and op-eds are being written to explain why our &quot;national character&quot; inspires such envy and mistrust around the world. For <em>American Humor </em>shows, like no other book, how much of that character has remained the same for the last 200 years, and, equally important, the ways we have changed.</p>
<p>Rourke, born in 1885, was part of a generation of critics—including Edmund Wilson and Van Wyck Brooks—that taught Americans to look at their culture in a new way. Instead of the genteel literary heritage of New England, which provided the official, schoolroom version of American culture, Rourke sought the essence of Americanness in folk culture and especially in popular comedy. Much like George Orwell, who in the 1930s searched boys' stories and seaside postcards for clues to the English character, Rourke studied what Marcus' introduction calls &quot;old almanacs, newspaper files, forgotten biographies, songbooks, joke manuals, penny dreadfuls, the unreliable leavings of nineteenth-century American culture.&quot;</p>
<p>What she found there were three archetypal figures, emerging from popular comedy: the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel. Each member of &quot;the trio,&quot; as Rourke often called them, took recognizable form in the 1820s and flourished until the Civil War. More important, she wrote, they remained at the heart of &quot;a consistent native tradition,&quot; which she traced through the classic American writers—Whitman, Hawthorne, Henry James—and up to the modernists of her own day, including T.S. Eliot. &quot;Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America,&quot; Rourke concluded. &quot;Its objective … has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity ... and the rounded completion of an American type.&quot; </p>
<p>Each member of the trio contributed to that type. The Yankee, Rourke wrote, was &quot;astute and simple, gross and rambling, rural to the core,&quot; hiding his sharp intelligence under a taciturn mask. He loved whittling, swapping, and practical jokes, and he always parried a question with another question. On the stage, where he was given outlandish New England names like &quot;Jedediah Homebred&quot; and &quot;Jerusalem Dutiful,&quot; the Yankee was shown thwarting his enemies—especially the snobbish Briton—thanks to his sly rustic wit. </p>
<p>If the Yankee turned silence into advantage, the backwoodsman triumphed through sheer volume: &quot;He shouted as though he were intoxicated by shouting.&quot; Born in the wilds of Kentucky and Tennessee, the backwoodsman—faced with hostile Indians and unforgiving soil—met adversity with comic self-inflation. Davy Crockett, the classic backwoodsman of legend, was &quot;shaggy as a bear, wolfish about the head, and could grin like a hyena until the bark would curl off a gum log&quot;; he could &quot;whip his weight in wild cats&quot; and &quot;put a rifle-ball through the moon.&quot; The tall tale, with its deadpan exaggeration, was the natural idiom of the backwoodsman.</p>
<p>Third, and most intriguing, was the minstrel: the white performer in blackface, of whom &quot;Jim Crow&quot; Rice was the first and most famous. Rourke acknowledges that &quot;blackface minstrelsy has long been considered a travesty in which the Negro was only a comic medium.&quot; But she honors it nonetheless, for providing a picture, however distorted, of genuine African-American folk culture: &quot;[T]he songs and to a large extent the dances [in minstrel performances] show Negro origins,&quot; Rourke insists, &quot;though they were often claimed by white composers.&quot; &quot;The Negro,&quot; in this strangely mediated form, communicated African music and dance to America; a century before the Jazz Age, Stephen Foster took the tune for &quot;Camptown Races&quot; from a black folk melody. The minstrel's &quot;humor&quot; combined energetic nonsense-verse—what Rourke calls &quot;unreasonable headlong triumph launching into the realm of the preposterous&quot;—with the &quot;tragic undertone&quot; found in work songs and spirituals. </p>
<p> Rourke's achievement in bringing &quot;the trio&quot; to life is remarkable, and the quotations and anecdotes she gathers from her 19<sup>th</sup>-century sources remain <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2098083">startlingly fresh</a>. But reading <em>American Humor </em> in 2004, one can't help but wonder: Do these three figures still &quot;induce an irresistible response,&quot; as they did for Rourke in 1931? Do the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel still offer &quot;emblems for a pioneer people&quot; when the people aren't such pioneers anymore?</p>
<p>The answers, I think, are &quot;no,&quot; &quot;yes,&quot; and &quot;sort of,&quot; in that order. Of the trio, the Yankee is certainly the least visible in today's popular culture. Partly this is because New England has lost its distinctive rural character, which could still be recognized as late as Robert Frost's <em>North of Boston </em>in 1914. But the vanishing of the Yankee is also due to our diminished taste for his virtues: self-deprecation and a poker face. Far more to our taste is the outrageous boastfulness of the backwoodsman, who finds descendants in the action hero and the rap star. In the superhuman feats of the first and the braggadocio of the second, we see the strutting of the figure Rourke called &quot;the gamecock of the wilderness.&quot; And, of course, the baleful tradition of the minstrel can be seen in the relentless appropriation of black popular culture by white performers, from Elvis to the present. But the qualities Rourke admired in minstrel performances—the triumphant energy, the tragic undertone—are still very much a part of the American aesthetic. The difference is that now we can experience it in genuine African-American culture—from the jazz of Louis Armstrong to the prose of Ralph Ellison—as well as in hybrids and imitations.</p>
<p>Most interesting of all, however, is to speculate about what a contemporary version of Rourke's book might include. If a Rourke of 2031 were to use popular culture to identify our most common archetypes, what would she find? First of all, I think, would be the Star, a type unknown in 1830 but absolutely central today. The Star is our secular, consumerist version of the Greek god: The pinnacle of aspiration and the focus of fantasy, he or she gets to enjoy what the rest of us only dream about. The Star—whether he is an actor or singer or sports figure—is not simply admired for what he is done; he is worshipped for who he is, gratuitously. The intensity of our worship and need also gives rise to the subcategory of the Fallen Star, from Marilyn Monroe to Kurt Cobain. The Fallen Star allows us to mix pity&nbsp;with our envy, reassuring us that, while we may dream of becoming one, the Star is best seen from a distance.</p>
<p>If the Star is the American triumphant, the Born-Again Sinner is the American repentant. The Sinner can be born again in the literal, Christian sense—this has been a common American experience ever since the 1820s, though Rourke only touches on religion in <em>American Humor</em>. But the posture of repentance, with the corresponding expectation of forgiveness, has transcended its evangelical origin, and today it shows up just about every time an American does something wrong. Bill Clinton's lip-quivering apology for the Monica Lewinsky affair is the most famous recent example. On the other hand, Martha Stewart was widely blamed, after her conviction, for not giving a better performance as the Sinner—for failing to break down and ask forgiveness, as the archetype demands. Whether such contrition is genuine hardly matters; the archetype is so powerful that simply to <em>act</em> like a Born-Again Sinner is almost a guarantee of absolution.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the latest incarnation of an ancient American trope: the Gangster, whose ancestors are the backwoodsman, the cowboy, and the pirate. What defines him is not just his criminality or his violence, but the way he puts these things at the service of his own defiant moral code. The Gangster exalts personal loyalty and masculine power, in opposition to what he sees as an inhumane and hypocritical mainstream culture. Americans like to see the Gangster punished, in the end. But we want him to be killed, not imprisoned—his ending should be as outsized as his life. The Star, the Born-Again Sinner, and the Gangster account for a great deal of today's American culture. But they are notably less comic than the archetypes Rourke found in our national psyche; after 200 years, perhaps America's youthful high spirits have turned into something darker and more resigned. </p>Wed, 31 Mar 2004 22:45:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2004/03/the_star_the_bornagain_sinner_and_the_gangster.htmlAdam Kirsch2004-03-31T22:45:00ZUpdating Constance Rourke's famous American archetypes.ArtsWhy Americans love stars, sinners, and gangsters.2098065Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2098065falsefalsefalseWhy Americans love stars, sinners, and gangsters.Why Americans love stars, sinners, and gangsters.Paradise Litehttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/02/paradise_lite.html
<p> Heaven has always been a touchy subject for religion. In fact, as Peter Stanford shows in his new study <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1403963606/103-1190202-5873432?v=glance">Heaven: A Guide to the Undiscovered Country</a>, </em> the greatest prophets have had little to say about it. Of course, the Old Testament contains references to a world to come, and the foundation of the New Testament is Jesus' promise of resurrection and &quot;the kingdom of heaven.&quot; But Moses and Jesus—and, for that matter, Muhammad—didn't spend much time actually drawing a map of the afterlife. In First Corinthians, St. Paul laid down the orthodox line when he simply refused to speculate about what heaven had in store: &quot;Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for those who love him.&quot;</p>
<p>It is true that, logically, we simply cannot know what heaven will be like. If, as Christianity believes, it is the place where our souls are united with God, then it's no more possible to describe heaven than it is to describe God himself. That's why Dante, at the conclusion of <em>Paradiso</em>, declares that he is unable to write down what he saw: &quot;From that moment my vision was greater than our speech.&quot; For austere or mystically inclined believers, this absolute otherness of heaven is what makes it absolutely desirable. &quot;To be in paradise,&quot; John Calvin reminded his followers, &quot;is not to speak to each other and be heard by each other, but only to enjoy God.&quot;</p>
<p>But heaven is not just an embarrassment to human reason; sometimes it is just plain embarrassing, a wish-fulfillment fantasy that has more to do with appetite than faith. Stanford's book, though light on analysis, is full of examples of the strange and frothy heavens invented by ordinary believers over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, the legendary land of Cockaigne was one such folk heaven: an endless feast, complete with pigs that trotted, already roasted, to the dinner table. By the 18<sup>th</sup> century, celestial luxury had become more refined, but it was no less extravagant; the popular tract <em>Friendship in Death </em>imagined &quot;bright cascades and crystal rivulets rolling over orient pearls and sands of gold.&quot; </p>
<p>By holding such populist visions at arm's length, the churches have tacitly admitted that heaven&nbsp;puts religious faith itself in a dubious light. Belief, it can easily seem, is just the quarter you put into the divine slot machine in order to win the jackpot of the afterlife. And certainly the greed for heaven is still alive and well. That much is clear from <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038550988X/103-1190202-5873432">A Travel Guide to Heaven</a></em>, a new Christian inspirational book. The author, Anthony DeStefano, takes his travel-guide conceit literally, declaring that paradise is &quot;Disney World, Hawaii, Paris, Rome and New York all rolled up into one&quot;—the &quot;ultimate playground, created purely for our enjoyment.&quot; The disingenuousness of DeStefano's fantasy has to be read to be believed: He looks forward to a heaven where you are your earthly self, but thinner, younger, and prettier, and where you will do nothing but race from one game,&nbsp;hobby, or exotic sight to the next, &quot;having fun&quot; for eternity. No detail is too small for DeStefano's cruise-director God to take care of: &quot;You shouldn't be shocked,&quot; he writes, if on Judgment Day &quot;you feel a paw anxiously poking at your leg&quot;—yes, Rover will be there, too.</p>
<p>Ironically, while <em>A Travel Guide to Heaven </em>is clearly the work of a true believer—and is shelved in the religion section of the bookstore—it has nowhere near the moral concern of two recent best-selling, secular accounts of heaven. Mitch Albom's <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786868716/103-1190202-5873432">The Five People You Meet in Heaven</a></em>—the follow-up to <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076790592X/103-1190202-5873432">Tuesdays With Morrie</a></em>—and <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316666343/103-1190202-5873432">The Lovely Bones</a></em>, the hugely successful debut novel by Alice Sebold, have a genuine thirst for heaven. These heavens are not easy consumerist paradises. Instead, both Albom and Sebold give us something new in the history of the afterlife: a therapeutic heaven. For both writers, heaven has nothing to do with pleasure; it is the place where you listen to your inner child, repair your self-esteem, and finally reach closure.</p>
<p>In <em>The Lovely Bones</em>, we see heaven literally through the eyes of a child: 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who has been raped and murdered by a serial-killer neighbor. The lurid violence and emotional manipulations of the tale are standard popular-fiction fare. What makes the book unusual is that Susie's murder, and its ramifications for her family, are all narrated by the dead girl herself as she watches from heaven. Sebold does make some attempts at describing what goes on up there, imagining a paradise tailor-made to Susie's childish fantasies. (&quot;Our heaven had an ice cream shop.&quot;) But there is something forlorn and even frightening about Sebold's descriptions of heaven since what really interests her—and Susie—is Earth. Far from being content in the afterlife, Susie has her nose pressed against &quot;the Inbetween,&quot; trying to witness and, if possible, affect events on Earth. Like a course of psychoanalysis, this eager observation must go on until Susie has made peace with her &quot;issues.&quot; Once she can approve of &quot;the lovely bones that had grown around my absence&quot;—&quot;the connections ... made at great cost, that happened after I was gone&quot;—she is released to some other higher plane of the afterlife.</p>
<p>In almost exactly the same way, Albom's heaven involves not leaving oneself behind but studying oneself more intensely than was ever possible on Earth. Eddie, the 83-year-old protagonist, dies saving a girl from a roller-coaster accident. Arriving in heaven, he learns that he must confront the five people he has most intimately affected and been affected by. He reviews his whole life, with the goal—again as in therapy—of putting his demons to rest. Eddie feared and resented his father, but he learns to see him as just a flawed human being who meant well. He neglected his wife but gets to spend more quality time with her and earn her forgiveness.</p>
<p>What these visions of heaven have in common is their refusal of transcendence. They are unable to believe in anything more important than the individual human being or more significant than his or her earthly suffering. What makes them distinctly 21<sup>st</sup>-century heavens is the nature of that suffering. DeStefano's heaven is really just an updated Cockaigne, full of the latest refinements in luxury. Albom and Sebold, on the other hand, could only be the products of our affluent, post-religious society—not pious enough to be concerned with God and not hungry enough to fantasize about food. Instead, the afflictions they want heaven to cure are the very ones our wealth seems to aggravate: loneliness, alienation, emotional deprivation. Instead of being &quot;God's spies,&quot; as Shakespeare wrote in <em>King Lear,</em> we will spy for ourselves, on ourselves; heaven means a chance to get our inner lives right at last. (The same principle is at work in the Bill Murray movie <em>Groundhog Day</em>, which in its relentless focus on self-improvement, rather than self-sacrifice, updates <em>It's a Wonderful Life </em>for the 1990s.) Instead of angelic choirs, it now seems, we will be greeted in heaven by the sound of a billion voices, all talking about themselves.</p>Thu, 05 Feb 2004 20:05:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/02/paradise_lite.htmlAdam Kirsch2004-02-05T20:05:00ZIn heaven, you'll be thinner, happier, and smarter—or so Americans think.ArtsA history of cultural ideas of heaven.2095002Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2095002falsefalsefalseA history of cultural ideas of heaven.A history of cultural ideas of heaven.The Storyteller's New Clotheshttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2003/11/the_storytellers_new_clothes.html
<p>Beloved writers are like lenient jailers—they let their creations sneak off the page and roam at large through our imagination. Most writers are lucky to grant such freedom to one character, a Sherlock Holmes or a Huck Finn; the greatest, like Dickens or Shakespeare, leave behind a whole family. But an even rarer achievement is to invent characters so inevitable, so primal that they seem never to have had an author at all. Surely no one person sitting at a desk created the Little Match Girl, Thumbelina, the Ugly Duckling?</p>
<p>Of course, all of these characters—along with such stories as &quot;The Emperor's New Clothes,&quot; &quot;The Snow Queen,&quot; and &quot;The Red Shoes&quot;—were either invented or given their definitive form by Hans Christian Andersen. But Andersen is almost never thought of as a literary artist, like his contemporaries Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Flaubert. He is usually grouped instead with the Brothers Grimm, who did not invent their folk tales but recorded them; or else he is reduced to a clich&eacute;, a kindly uncle surrounded by tots, as in the classic movie with Danny Kaye.</p>
<p>But a new edition of Andersen's most famous tales, translated by Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, means to change all that. The Franks declare their intention to treat Andersen as he is treated in his native Denmark: as a sophisticated modern writer, to be read and studied as seriously as his fellow Copenhagener, and one-time reviewer, S&oslash;ren Kierkegaard. They translate Andersen's Danish into idiomatic contemporary English, capturing his deliberate colloquialism. More strikingly, they provide each of the 22 stories with footnotes, demonstrating their roots in Andersen's own life. In many ways the book itself strains against their scholarship—it is a luxurious, oversized volume, featuring 19<sup>th</sup>-century illustrations, obviously meant to be read to children at bedtime. In this setting, the Franks' introduction—which by Page 4 is analyzing Andersen's masturbation habits—seems oddly adult.</p>
<p>Yet the tension between the adult and the childlike, the literary and the folk, drove Andersen's stories from the beginning. His ambition was not to bring joy to children but to become a famous artist. &quot;I covet honor and glory in the same way as the miser covets gold,&quot; he admitted. While Andersen's novels, plays, and travel-writing gained him a certain reputation in Denmark, it was not until 1835, when he published <em>Tales Told for Children</em>, that he achieved international celebrity. His first stories were retellings of folk tales heard in childhood. Soon, however, he put the form of the fairy tale at the service of an intensely personal and modern kind of fiction.</p>
<p>Part of that modernity has to do with style. In the famous opening of &quot;The Snow Queen,&quot; Andersen uses a broken narration that both imitates traditional storytelling and looks forward to stream of consciousness. &quot;All right, let's get started! When we're at the end of the story, we'll know more than we do now, because there was an evil troll, one of the worst—it was the devil.&quot; There is an echo here of <em>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</em>, just as &quot;Auntie Toothache&quot;—framed as the journal of a student tormented by toothaches—anticipates the frantic unreliable narrator of Knut Hamsun's <em>Hunger</em>. And a post-Freudian age has no trouble understanding Andersen's sexually fraught, surreal metaphors, as in &quot;The Red Shoes&quot;:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She could think only about those shoes—even when the vicar put his hand on her head and talked about the holy baptism, about the covenant with God, and how she was about to become a grown-up Christian. The organ played solemnly, the children's choir sounded beautiful, and the old cantor sang, but Karen could think of nothing but her red shoes. By afternoon everyone had told the old lady that Karen's shoes were red. The old lady said that red shoes were altogether inappropriate and that Karen had done a horrible thing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But Andersen's spirit belongs to his age, not ours. At its best, that spirit is Romantic, devoted to the sanctity of individual imagination. Andersen's Ugly Duckling who turns out to be a swan is, as the Franks note, a coded autobiography, drawing on his own transformation from gauche provincial to friend of kings. But it is still more a defense of the artistic imagination and a defiance of bourgeois conformity—a staple of Romantic literature. The Little Mermaid, redeemed by unselfish love, is a close cousin to <em>Crime and Punishment</em>'s Sonya and <em>La Traviata</em>'s Violetta. And &quot;The Snow Queen,&quot; Andersen's attack on cold, calculating reason, echoes every 19<sup>th</sup>-century writer from Wordsworth to Tolstoy.</p>
<p>And when Andersen becomes cloying and condescending, he is no less representative of his time. Like Dickens—whom he once visited for five unhappy weeks—Andersen is prone to moralizing and sentimentality. Dickens's Little Nell has become a byword for Victorian mawkishness,<strong></strong>but the bathetic death-scene of Andersen's Little Match Girl is just as bad (&quot;There was no more cold, no hunger, no fear—they were with God&quot;); and few mothers today will want their children to absorb the lesson of &quot;Father's Always Right.&quot; (&quot;Yes, indeed, it always pays when the wife realizes that Father is wisest and what he does is always right.&quot;) But in his worst moments, as in his best, Andersen is much more complex and challenging than the Disney version we know today. Even when he was writing for children, he was talking to grown-ups.</p>Wed, 26 Nov 2003 16:17:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2003/11/the_storytellers_new_clothes.htmlAdam Kirsch2003-11-26T16:17:00ZA new translation of Hans Christian Andersen.ArtsA new translation of Hans Christian Andersen.2091665Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2091665falsefalsefalseA new translation of Hans Christian Andersen.A new translation of Hans Christian Andersen.Samuel Johnson's Peculiar Dictionaryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/09/samuel_johnsons_peculiar_dictionary.html
<p>Modern dictionaries have a longer masthead than the average magazine; my copy of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 25 editors. But the first—and still, by some measures, the best—comprehensive dictionary of the English language had only one name on the title page: &quot;Dr. Samuel Johnson, A.M.&quot; The master's degree was honorary—in fact, Johnson had only one year of university education before poverty forced him to leave the bowers of Oxford for the hard labor of Grub Street. (&quot;<em>Grubstreet</em>: Originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet.&quot;) His education, like his dictionary, was strictly a product of his own industry and genius.</p>
<p>Of all Johnson's works, <em>A Dictionary of the English Language </em>is probably the most impressive and the least known. His essays in <em>The Idler </em>and <em>The Rambler</em>, his poems &quot;London&quot;<em></em>and &quot;The Vanity of Human Wishes,&quot;<em></em>his masterful <em>Lives of the English Poets</em>—all of these are still read, by people who read such things. But Johnson's dictionary is known mainly from Boswellian anecdotes—as when a woman asked him how he came to define &quot;pastern,&quot; wrongly, as &quot;the knee of a horse.&quot; &quot;Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance,&quot; he replied, managing, in a typically Johnsonian way, to turn humility into hauteur.</p>
<p>Certainly it would not do to go through the libraries of the world replacing the OED with Johnson's dictionary. His definitions are sometimes wrong (as with &quot;pastern&quot;), sometimes whimsical (&quot;lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge&quot;), and sometimes opinionated (&quot;sonnet: A short poem consisting of fourteen lines ... It is not very suitable to the English language&quot;). Often he records accurately an 18<sup>th</sup>-century definition that is now hopelessly inadequate (&quot;<em>electricity</em>: A property in some bodies, whereby, when rubbed so as to grow warm, they draw little bits of paper, or such like substances, to them&quot;). And, of course, many words have simply changed their meaning from Johnson's time to ours (&quot;cartoon: A painting or drawing upon large paper&quot;; &quot;advertisement: 1. Instruction; admonition; 2. Intelligence; information; 3. Notice of any thing published in a paper of intelligence&quot;). </p>
<p>But it is just these qualities that make Johnson's dictionary a delightful book and certainly the best dictionary for reading and browsing. <a>This</a> is especially true of the new edition, <em>Samuel Johnson's Dictionary</em>, edited by Jack Lynch (to be published on Sept. 18, 2003, Johnson's 294<sup>th</sup> birthday). <a href="http://www.slate.com#Correct">*</a> Lynch has selected 3,100 entries—out of Johnson's original 42,000—for the beautifully produced volume, which also includes a useful introduction and the full text of Johnson's preface,<strong></strong>one of the best examples of his classical, magniloquent prose. Reading the dictionary in this form makes<strong></strong>clear that what separates Johnson from the standard modern lexicographer is not just time and methodology, but his basic understanding of language: He is<strong></strong>literary and subjective, rather than scientific and objective.</p>
<p>Of course, the scientific, objective dictionary has an important purpose. Anyone trying to find out about the ape would learn more from Webster (&quot;any of a family [Pongidae] of large tailless semierect primates&quot;) than from Johnson (&quot;A kind of monkey remarkable for imitating what he sees&quot;). But then again, is the Webster definition really more illuminating? Certainly the ape is a member of the family Pongidae, but practically, isn't it more important to know that an ape is remarkable for imitating what he sees since that is the sense that the word &quot;ape&quot; conveys to an English-speaker? Perhaps it is his very lack of scientific knowledge that makes Johnson more alert to the word as we use it, rather than as it would appear in a textbook on primates. He is less concerned about fixing the word with an absolute definition than suggesting its range of tones and implications.</p>
<p>The difference could be captured by imagining each dictionary's ideal reader. The modern dictionary's ideal reader is a Martian scientist: someone with no background knowledge, no context or assumptions, who wants a unique definition for every word. Johnson's dictionary, on the other hand, implies a reader much like Johnson himself: a curious and intelligent speaker of English who comes to the dictionary not to learn the meanings of familiar words, but to gain a fuller sense of them—their overtones, history, and idiomatic use. Johnson recognizes the paradox of the dictionary—you have to know most of what's in it in order to use it—and writes accordingly. </p>
<p>If Johnson's dictionary is literary in this fundamental sense, it is also a part of English literature in at least three other ways. First, it illustrates most words with quotations, making the book as much an anthology as a dictionary: With its passages from Addison and Swift, Locke and Milton, Pope and Newton, there could be no better way to get a sense of classic English prose and verse style. Johnson gets more examples from Shakespeare than any other writer, and Lynch's edition includes a useful index of these citations by play. </p>
<p>Second, as Lynch points out, Johnson's was the dictionary used by every English writer of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, from Jane Austen to Oscar Wilde. Any reader confused by an old meaning or unexpected nuance in those writers could find enlightenment in Johnson, who not only used their language but helped to make it. Finally, Johnson's own writing is a model of style. Instead of Fowler or Strunk and White, writers might want to turn to Johnson for lessons in good writing—above all, how to convey the most information in the fewest and clearest words. Johnson's dictionary may not be perfect, but it's still the greatest work of literature in the reference section.</p>
<p><strong> <a><em>Correction</em></a><em>, Sept. 17, 2003:</em></strong><em> This article originally stated that</em> Samuel Johnson's Dictionary<em> was issued to commemorate Johnson's 194<sup>th</sup> birthday. Johnson would have been 294 this year. (</em> <a href="http://www.slate.com#This"><em>Return</em></a><em> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>Wed, 17 Sep 2003 15:39:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/09/samuel_johnsons_peculiar_dictionary.htmlAdam Kirsch2003-09-17T15:39:00ZA dictionary should be scientifically objective—or should it?ArtsSamuel Johnson's Dictionary, revised.2088405Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2088405falsefalsefalseSamuel Johnson's Dictionary, revised.Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, revised.The Unreliable Superegohttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2003/07/the_unreliable_superego.html
<p> The standard edition of the works of Sigmund Freud runs to 24 volumes, and its influence on the literature of the 20<sup>th</sup> century is incalculable. Translated by James Strachey (brother of Lytton) and published by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press from the 1950s through the 1970s, the collected Freud gave the English language a whole new vocabulary—we can thank Strachey for &quot;id,&quot; &quot;ego,&quot; and &quot;superego,&quot; his technical-sounding versions of what in Freud's German was literally &quot;it,&quot; &quot;I,&quot; and &quot;above-I.&quot; Still more important, Strachey's Freud served as the bridge on which Freud's theories passed into our culture. As W.H. Auden wrote in an elegy for Freud, &quot;he is no more a person/ now but a whole climate of opinion.&quot;</p>
<p>Today, Freud's reputation as a scientist is at a low ebb. Psychoanalysis has given way to &quot;therapy&quot; and medication as the best cures for what ails us. Appropriately, however, Freud's achievement has been &quot;repressed&quot; but not banished; like all repressed things, it has returned in a new, disguised form—as literature. Just like the school of biblical interpretation that approaches the Bible as a literary work, &quot;Freud as literature&quot; tries to find secular value in a once sacred text. Thus we have the New Penguin Freud, a project launched this summer under the editorship of British man of letters and psychologist Adam Phillips. Instead of a monumental edition by a single translator, each book will be translated and published separately as a paperback in the Penguin Classics series. There are no indexes, no scholarly footnotes, no attempt to standardize the translation from one volume to the next. And the technical vocabulary has been cut back to a minimum: not a &quot;cathexis&quot; in sight. In short, Penguin Classics is treating Freud like the other great imaginative writers—Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Melville—in its series.</p>
<p>But what does it mean to read Freud as literature rather than as theory? The first books in the New Penguin Freud, published in June, offer some answers. Significantly, the series has started not with major theoretical works like <em>The Interpretation of Dreams</em> or anthropological ones like <em>Totem and Taboo</em>. Instead, the first four books are concrete, practical, and anecdotal: <em>The Schreber Case</em>, <em>The &quot;Wolfman&quot; and Other Cases</em>,<em> The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious</em>,<em></em>and <em>The Psychopathology of Everyday Life</em>. Together, they suggest four ways of approaching Freud as literature.</p>
<p><strong>Freud as novelist of manners</strong><strong>:</strong> Freud believed that he had discovered fundamental truths about the mind—laws and mechanisms that were valid for human beings everywhere. But what strikes a reader today is how richly Freud evokes one particular time and place: Central Europe at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. When Freud mistakes Botticelli for Signorelli in a conversation aboard a train in Herzegovina, we glimpse the vanished cosmopolitan elegance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On the other hand, when he gives a catalog of Jewish jokes, revolving around matchmakers and Rothschilds, we hear the bittersweet folk humor of a world destroyed by the Nazis. Freud is as much an elegist for these high and low cultures as the great Austrian Jewish novelist Joseph Roth. Meanwhile, the childhood traumas of his patients take place in an <em>haute bourgeois </em>ecosystem, with its nannies and maids and summer villas, that now seems remote as Jane Austen.</p>
<p><strong>Freud as literary critic</strong><strong>:</strong> It is no secret that much of Freud's inspiration came from literature—his most famous coinage, the Oedipus complex, is an allusion to Sophocles. In his 1916 essay &quot;Some Character Types Met With in Psychoanalytic Work,&quot; he turns directly to literary criticism. Drawing on his own clinical work, he offers brilliant insights into Lady Macbeth—an example of &quot;Those who Founder on Success&quot;—and Richard III—one of those who believe that past injuries have made them &quot;Exceptions&quot; to moral rules. And of course Freud's writing is dense with allusions to German literature. His treatise on jokes takes many examples from the poet Heinrich Heine—he is especially fond of Heine's coinage &quot;famillionairely,&quot; to describe the condescending friendliness of a rich man—and from the aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.</p>
<p>More broadly, however, Freud's approach to jokes, slips of the tongue, dreams, and memories is that of a literary critic. He contends that any &quot;text,&quot; from a nightmare to a six-digit number chosen at random, has an &quot;author&quot; in the unconscious; and like a good &quot;close reader,&quot; he is always asking why something is expressed in just <em>these</em> words and images. In fact, one might say that Freud's innovation was to treat all of human consciousness as a book, where nothing is written down without a reason.</p>
<p><strong>Freud as detective</strong><strong>:</strong> The secluded study, the thoughtful silences, the brilliant deductive leaps, even the cocaine addiction—there is no mistaking the similarity between Freud and Sherlock Holmes. Freud's case studies of the Wolfman and the Ratman share the suspense and glamour of Conan Doyle's tales of the Red-Headed League or the Speckled Band. Someone comes to Freud with a nightmare of six white wolves perched in a tree, or an obsessive fear of horses. The doctor, like the detective, is not deeply interested in legwork: Instead he sits in his study, listening quietly as the evidence forms a pattern in his mind, and then triumphantly names the culprit. Of course, in Freud's world the guilty party is always the victim himself, wearing the disguise of the unconscious—it is his own lusts and shames that have left him phobic or paranoid. There is another similarity: Just as with Conan Doyle, one often feels with Freud that the solution comes too easily, that convenient evidence is introduced by sleight of hand. And this leads in turn to the fourth and most interesting version of Freud.</p>
<p><strong>Freud as unreliable narrator:</strong><em></em>From Emma Woodhouse to Humbert Humbert, the protagonists of novels often have a weaker grasp on reality than the reader does; the author allows or encourages us to second-guess his own creation. It is very tempting to read Freud as one such unreliable narrator, since his theories and conclusions are so often immune to logic. Again and again, he flat-out admits that &quot;I know I shall not convince a single person who does not wish to be convinced&quot; of his theories; as in a cult, one must believe first and understand later. Suspiciously, he seems to pull the same rabbit out of every hat: A full-blown adult paranoiac is suffering from repressed sexual desire for his father, as is a fearful 5-year-old boy, as is an obsessive-compulsive young man. It is hard to read the case study of &quot;Little Hans,&quot; in which a father psychoanalyzes his own child, without wondering if we are reading a devastating satire on the credulity of modern child-rearing. Yet this &quot;unreliability&quot; cannot be a deliberate literary device, since Freud the author and Freud the narrator are identical—every theory he puts forward is meant with the utmost earnestness. And here is where we reach the limits of &quot;Freud as literature&quot;: Freud, unlike Nabokov, would certainly not want to be read with the aesthetic indulgence we give to an imaginative writer. He would be dismayed to discover that, more than 60 years after his death, it is easy for us to enjoy him—as long as we don't have to believe him.</p>Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:21:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2003/07/the_unreliable_superego.htmlAdam Kirsch2003-07-31T15:21:00ZAdam Phillips' revealing new edition of Freud.ArtsFreud, the novelist.2086413Adam KirschBookshttp://www.slate.com/id/2086413falsefalsefalseFreud, the novelist.Freud, the novelist.L.A. Without a Maphttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/06/la_without_a_map.html
<p> Last year, the Library of America published the excellent <em> <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnInquiry.asp?sourceid=00000037587278956868&amp;ISBN=1931082278&amp;bfdate=06-30-2003+14:34:20"><em>Writing Los Angeles</em></a></em>, a massive anthology of a century of writing about the city. But if you are a native of Los Angeles, paging through all the travel notes and memoirs and short stories is a strange sensation. Where you expect to find the city itself, there is only a carnival of metaphors.</p>
<p>Again and again, writers with the briefest experience of<strong></strong>Los Angeles use it as a blank screen on which to project their own fantasies, prophecies, and fears. For Nathanael West in <em>The Day of the Locust</em>, it was famously a &quot;dream dump,&quot; a &quot;Sargasso of the imagination&quot; in which civilization is reduced to &quot;plaster, canvas, lath and paint.&quot; For Truman Capote, it was a nightmare city where &quot;a crack in the wall, which might somewhere else have charm, only strikes an ugly note prophesying doom.&quot; And those are some of the milder opinions. H.L. Mencken thought &quot;there were more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on earth.&quot; Aldous Huxley wrote that &quot;the truest patriots, it may be, are those who pray for a national calamity&quot; to wipe the smile off the face of &quot;Joy City.&quot; </p>
<p>What did Los Angeles do to deserve all this? <em>Writing Los Angeles</em> makes the answer clear: Although it is the second-largest city in America, in the literary imagination it is still a colony. Instead of speaking for itself, the city is spoken <em>about</em>. Our classic descriptions of Los Angeles were written by visitors who spent only a few weeks or months in the city; or by imported slaves of Hollywood, who act out their rebellion against the city at large; or even by natives writing mainly for an audience somewhere else. What is missing, with a few notable exceptions, is a Los Angeles literature unconcerned with the outside world, intent on explaining the city to itself—as Dickens did with London, or Balzac with Paris. Instead, visitors from the East or from Europe write about it just as English visitors used to write about Ireland or India, or for that matter the United States itself. Only such breezy condescension could explain some of the nonsense in the volume—for instance, Umberto Eco's remark that &quot;for a Californian, leaving his car means leaving his own humanity,&quot; which sounds like the kind of thing an early anthropologist might have said about a Polynesian tribe.</p>
<p>What makes this condescension so irritating is that, in every arena except the literary, Los Angeles is a powerhouse of American and even world culture. West's &quot;dream dump&quot; is really a dream depot, supplying every city from Tokyo to London with its indelible images. In fact, that may be the very reason literary visitors since Huxley have taken such joy in imagining the city's destruction: Hollywood is the capital of post-literate culture, the place where writers were first transformed from unacknowledged legislators to &quot;content providers.&quot; No wonder that, as Mike Davis wrote in <em>The Ecology of Fear</em>, &quot;at least 138 novels and films since 1909&quot; have dealt with the destruction of the city by fire, flood, earthquake, nuclear holocaust, or alien invasion. Apocalypse is the writer's best revenge.</p>
<p>Or so it might appear in <em>Writing Los Angeles</em>. But now a new book offers a more serious and hopeful view. <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1888996692/"><em>The Misread City</em></a></em>, edited by journalist Scott Timberg and poet and National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, attempts to rebut the Library of America volume with its very title. A collection of essays and articles by and about L.A. writers, it shows that the city is more than ready to leave its colonial days behind.</p>
<p>In fact, Gioia's essay &quot;On Being a California Poet&quot; expresses the very paradox that has driven post-colonial poets, from Ireland to the West Indies: &quot;The classics of English—Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats and Tennyson—are my classics. ... And yet this rich literary heritage often stands at one remove from the experiential reality of the West. ... There's no use listening for a nightingale in the scrub oaks and chaparral.&quot; It is almost exactly the same sentiment as in Derek Walcott's poem about his Caribbean youth, &quot;Another Time&quot;:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>from childhood he'd considered palms<br />ignobler than imagined elms,<br />the breadfruit's splayed<br />leaf coarser than the oak's ...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet as Walcott's own achievement shows, the collision between an inherited language and a new world should be a fruitful one, provoking entirely new ways of writing. To write about Los Angeles as it feels to those who <em>live</em> there is just the kind of challenge that led to Walcott's poetry about Saint Lucia, or Saul Bellow's novels about Chicago. </p>
<p><em>The Misread City</em> suggests what needs to be done to create the literary culture in which L.A. writing can flourish. In a city where architecture is replaceable and films ephemeral, there needs to be a solid understanding of the literary past. David Fine's &quot;Surviving Apocalypse&quot; and Paul Skenazy's &quot;A World Gone Wrong: L.A. Detectives&quot; contribute to this understanding by surveying two of the hardiest tropes in Los Angeles writing, while essays on John Rechy and Walter Mosley size up the strengths—and the limitations—of major local figures. </p>
<p>The great hole at the heart of Los Angeles literature has always been the lack of venues where L.A. writing can be published and discussed. As Timberg writes, &quot;Los Angeles keeps to itself, favors the private. ... What L.A. has always needed is institutions that can knit the private factions together and instill in people a sense of living in a community.&quot; Several pieces in the book talk about how radio shows and lecture series provide such a community; and the <em>Los Angeles Times Book Review</em> is now widely recognized as perhaps the best newspaper book section in the country. (Full disclosure: My father writes a column for it.) An immense amount of good could be done by introducing a few literary quarterlies in the model of the <em>Southern Review</em> and <em>Sewanee Review</em>, which in the 1930s made the South the home of the most intelligent literary criticism in the English-speaking world. In fact, <em>The Misread City</em> often reads like such a magazine, and with the right patron could become one. </p>
<p>Most important, however, Los Angeles literature should resolutely ignore the issue of authenticity. The poet Laurence Goldstein takes note of the &quot;sense of cultural inferiority passed from one literary person to another in the Southland like some swamp fever on the lowest slopes of Parnassus.&quot; No wonder, since visitor after visitor has told the world that L.A. is a simulacrum, a fiction—&quot;a perfect imitation,&quot; in Eco's words. But Christopher Isherwood, who lived in the city for half of his life, was closer to the truth when he wrote that &quot;It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is 'unreal.' &quot; When Los Angeles achieves the literature it is capable of, no one will dare to say it again.</p>Mon, 30 Jun 2003 19:00:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/06/la_without_a_map.htmlAdam Kirsch2003-06-30T19:00:00ZHas the American literary imagination gotten Los Angeles wrong?ArtsThe weakness of L.A. literature.2085041Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2085041falsefalsefalseThe weakness of L.A. literature.The weakness of L.A. literature.I Sing Ireland Electrichttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/04/i_sing_ireland_electric.html
<p> If you were to make a map of 20<sup>th</sup>-century English-language poetry, Ireland would not be a small island but a sprawling continent. Thanks mostly to two Nobel Prize-winning poets, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Ireland has assumed a central place in the imaginations of American poetry readers. The latest sign of our interest is the awarding of this year's Pulitzer Prize to Paul Muldoon, an excellent Irish poet now living in New Jersey. Why do we love the Irish so much? In large part it's because these poets have portrayed an Ireland that seems glamorously different from our own modern, urban, technological society.</p>
<p>In Yeats' poetry, Ireland is turned into a haunt of gods and heroes, from the faeries of folklore to his own proud Anglo-Irish ancestors. His valedictory poem &quot;Under Ben Bulben&quot; conjures an ancient aristocratic order, telling Irish poets to: &quot;Sing the lords and ladies gay/ That were beaten into the clay/ Through seven heroic centuries.&quot; <br /><br />Seamus Heaney, who was born in 1939, the year of Yeats' death, deliberately writes against this larger-than-life legend of &quot;Romantic Ireland.&quot; But his vision of Ireland nevertheless possesses an exotic appeal for American readers nostalgic for traditional rural life. Heaney's language is full of heavy, earthy consonants, and in its very humility it seems to come from an earlier world: A famous early poem, &quot;Digging,&quot; imagines his grandfather at work among &quot;The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap/ Of soggy peat.&quot; Heaney sees his own poetry as a form of that earthy labor: &quot;Beneath my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I'll dig with it.&quot;</p>
<p>Against this backdrop, the Irish poetry of Dennis O'Driscoll seems startlingly realistic, invigoratingly modern. O'Driscoll, a 48-year-old Dubliner and the author of six collections of poems, is well-known in Ireland and Britain as a poet and critic, but he is little read in the United States. This is a shame, since he is one of the most interesting poets now writing in English. (His new book, <em>Exemplary Damages</em>, is available in America this month, and his last two books, <em>Quality Time</em><em></em>and <em>Weather Permitting</em>, contain some of his best work.)<em></em></p>
<p>O'Driscoll's poetry brings welcome news of a demystified Ireland, a country that has undergone &quot;globalization&quot; and come out looking very much like the rest of the First World. O'Driscoll speaks wryly of these modish similarities in &quot;The Celtic Tiger&quot;:<br /><br /></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Outside new antique pubs, young consultants—well-toned women, gel-slick men—<br />drain long-necked bottles of imported beer.<br />Lip-glossed cigarettes are poised<br />at coy angles, a black bra strap<br />slides strategically from a Rocha top.<br />Talk of tax-exempted town-house lettings<br />is muffled by rap music blasted<br />from a passing four-wheel drive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As these lines show, O'Driscoll's Dublin is a version of London or New York.</p>
<p>In addition to being a poet, O'Driscoll is a career civil servant, and his years working in offices have given him a disabused perspective on the daily life of the average citizen of Dublin—or Denver, for that matter. No poet since Philip Larkin, a famously effective librarian, has made sharper observations about the nature of contemporary work: the jargon, the boredom, the small compensations. This is captured unerringly in &quot;The Bottom Line,&quot; a sort of sonnet sequence, made up of 50 11-line poems. A few references to &quot;VAT&quot; (a European tax) and &quot;EC directives&quot; let us know that we are not in America, but otherwise O'Driscoll could be writing about any executive anywhere:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How did I get this far, become<br />this worldly-wise, letting off steam<br />to suppliers, sure of my own ground?<br />What did my dribbling, toddling stage<br />prepare me for? What was picked up<br />from cloth-paged books, stuffed bears,<br />all those cute gap-toothed years?<br />So embarrassing the idiocies of my past,<br />seen from the vantage of tooled-leather<br />and buffed teak, hands-on management<br />techniques, line logistics, voice mail.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>O'Driscoll's characteristic tone is wry, precise, and self-aware; it is a style incapable of mythologizing. In fact, he is at his best when stripping away illusions, especially the illusions we all use to fend off our fear of sickness and death. Like Larkin, O'Driscoll can't stop looking forward to what he mordantly calls &quot;Deadlines&quot;:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your time will come<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; when it gets a minute,<br />refusing to be pinned down,<br />despatching you at whim …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>O'Driscoll fights against these quiet forebodings, not with the grand defenses of poetry—magnificent rhetoric, noble aesthetic structures—but with the modest and trustworthy weapon of wit. He marks the passage of time by observing &quot;The word <em>vintage</em> as it occurs/ in the second-hand shop-talk/ of the clothes store—say, in/ this label: <em>Vintage Slip, 1980s</em>.&quot; More seriously, he walks in a churchyard and wonders:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Who had a crush on the girl<br />Six headstones away.<br />Who couldn't muster<br />the courage.<br />Who wouldn't make<br />the first move.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>O'Driscoll's poetry has the rare virtue of making us feel that most other poets are forcing things a little, striving for effect. He writes directly, naturally, about the emotions that are closest to us and, for that very reason, go unobserved: how we actually feel about work and possessions and aging. This may seem too ordinary for readers who look to Ireland for a rural authenticity or mythic glamour missing from their own country—as O'Driscoll has noted, &quot;Foreign readers expect Irish poets to 'sing' &quot; At his best, however, O'Driscoll makes speech—the kind of plain, true speech Worsdsworth had in mind when he called the poet &quot;a man speaking to men&quot;—seem just as exciting.</p>Wed, 16 Apr 2003 16:25:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/04/i_sing_ireland_electric.htmlAdam Kirsch2003-04-16T16:25:00ZDennis O'Driscoll's wired, modern picture of Dublin.ArtsIreland's best unknown poet.2081596Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2081596falsefalsefalseIreland's best unknown poet.Ireland's best unknown poet.A 21st-Century Manhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/03/a_21stcentury_man.html
<p> For 500 years after Dante wrote <em>The Divine Comedy</em>, there was no way for an English speaker to read it. Not until the early 19<sup>th</sup> century did Henry Cary publish the first complete English translation. Even by 1867, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published the first American edition of the poem, Dante was almost unknown in this country.</p>
<p> Today, publishers seem to be trying to make up for that long drought by issuing new translations of Dante at a breakneck pace. In fact, we're living in a golden age of Dante translation. Former Poet Laureate (and <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> poetry editor) Robert Pinsky touched it off when he published an excellent, widely acclaimed verse translation of the <em>Inferno </em> in 1995. In just the last year, five new editions of the <em>Inferno</em> have appeared, including a reprint of Longfellow's landmark version. Still more surprising, there are three new <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2080688">translations</a> of the much less popular <em>Purgatorio</em>, the second of the <em>Comedy</em>'s three &quot;canticles.&quot;And the torrent doesn't stop there. New York Review Books Classics has issued a new edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 19<sup>th</sup>-century translation of Dante's autobiographical book <em>La Vita Nuova</em>; there are short biographies by Robert Hollander and RWB Lewis and a collection of essays in homage to the master, <em>The Poets' Dante</em>. There's even a historical thriller, <em>The Dante Club</em>, starring Longfellow as the detective-hero, now on the best-seller lists. Why are so many scholars and poets being drawn to this 700-year-old poem—and why do their publishers believe there's such a vast market for Dante?</p>
<p>Among American poets, Dante's reputation has been very high for nearly a century, thanks largely to T.S. Eliot. His poetry is saturated with Dante: The epigraph to &quot;The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock&quot; comes from the <em>Inferno</em>, as do some famous lines from &quot;The Waste Land&quot;; a long sequence in &quot;Little Gidding&quot; is an imitation of Dante's style; and the poem &quot;Animula&quot; is based on a passage from the <em>Purgatorio</em>. As Eliot explained in one of his best essays, Dante was important to him for two reasons. Poetically, Dante was a master of lucid, direct, dramatic language: Unlike the English Romantic poets Eliot despised, Dante never used words for vague emotional effect, but always had his object clearly in view. And philosophically Dante expressed the complete worldview of medieval Christianity, in which everything from falling in love to the arrangement of the stars could be understood as part of the divine plan. Dante's poetic lucidity was something Eliot hoped to import into modernist poetry; the philosophic wholeness was something he could only long for.</p>
<p>Eliot's view of Dante was highly influential for generations of poets and critics, and it even created a vogue for the medieval philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Today, however, there is no one central interpretation of Dante among writers and readers, and his popularity does not seem connected to any broad intellectual movement. The contributors to <em>The Poets' Dante</em> treat their relation to Dante as frankly personal—a matter of taking what they need. So, Seamus Heaney values the Dante who can &quot;accommodate the political and the transcendent,&quot; which is also a concern of his own Northern Irish poetry; J.D. McClatchy remembers the erotic force of the Gustave Dor&eacute; lithographs reproduced in his childhood edition of Dante; W.S. Merwin points out the way that poets themselves, as teachers and role models, are important characters in the <em>Comedy</em>. </p>
<p>What the poets find, in other words, is a postmodern Dante, a text that each reader collaborates in writing. This Dante has power but not authority; he is a great artist but not a commanding model, and certainly not a compelling religious example. This fits perfectly with the eclectic spirit of contemporary poetry, in which no one style is dominant and each poet must invent his own language and idiom.</p>
<p>Dante's appeal<strong></strong>to ordinary readers seems more mysterious. After all, <em>The</em><em>Divine Comedy</em> is suffused with Aristotelian philosophy, medieval astronomy, and the petty political rivalries of 13<sup>th</sup>-century Italy—not exactly best-seller material. What is it about this difficult masterpiece that would make today's readers want five different <em>Inferno</em>s and three <em>Purgatorio</em>s?</p>
<p>For one thing, Dante had a curiously modern sense of violent spectacle. The central dramatic technique of the <em>Inferno</em> is what Dante called the <em>contrapasso</em>—the fitting punishment that each sinner receives in the afterlife. In coming up with those punishments, Dante appealed to a basic appetite for fantastic violence—the kind that, today, is gratified by horror or science-fiction films. Take this scene (from the Robert and Jean Hollander translation) in which a<strong></strong>man is morphed into a lizard and a lizard into a man:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>First his calves and then his thighs began<br />to knit so that in but a moment<br />no sign of a division could be seen.</p>
<p>The cloven tail assumed the shapes<br />the other one was losing, and his skin<br />was turning soft while the other's hardened.</p>
<p>I saw the man's arms shrinking toward the armpits<br />and the brute's forepaws, which had been short,<br />lengthen, precisely as the other's dwindled.</p>
<p>Then the hind-paws, twisting together,<br />became the member that a man conceals,<br />and from his own the wretch had grown two paws.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dante's poetry is made up of such visions. They have a hallucinatory power, and their emotional force is clear even to a reader bored by the Aristotelian logic that makes Dante see usury as a sin of violence rather than a sin of avarice. And in a strange way, our own post-literate age has much in common with Dante's pre-literate one. For good and ill, we have become accustomed to thinking in images almost more than in words.</p>
<p>The second reason we are ripe for Dante is more troubling. Dante fell out of fashion during the Renaissance and the 18<sup>th</sup> century in part due to the sadism of the <em>Inferno</em>. A world that believed in the myths of reason and progress refused to see its reflection in Dante's butchered, charred, maggot-eaten corpses, his torturing devils and rivers of fire. But after the Battle of the Somme, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima, it is only too easy to see Dante's world as reflection of our own. Once again, there is an ironic counterpoint between the 13<sup>th</sup> century and the 21<sup>st</sup>. Dante could imagine vivid bodily tortures because he believed completely in the soul; our world inflicts those tortures because it doesn't believe in the soul at all.</p>
<p>For both these reasons, however, it is doubtful that the<em> Purgatorio</em> will strike a chord in readers the way the <em>Inferno</em> has. In this second part of the trilogy, Dante journeys to the Mountain of Purgatory, where the souls of the dead work off their sins so they can eventually rise into Paradise. This time, however, the pains are not tortures but penances: The souls in Purgatory actively want to suffer, because they know it is God's will. This is an understanding of God that even devout Christians would find hard to accept today. What's more, the <em>Purgatorio</em> is filled with long discourses on love, sin, and the soul, on embryology and astronomy. It is not less marvelous than the <em>Inferno</em>, but it is more exacting and requires greater imaginative submission to the Dantean universe. Dante's purgatory and his heaven are magnificent, but they remain essentially foreign. Only his hell seems less like fiction than history.</p>Wed, 26 Mar 2003 18:25:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/03/a_21stcentury_man.htmlAdam Kirsch2003-03-26T18:25:00ZWhy is Dante hot all of a sudden?ArtsWhy is Dante hot?2080680Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2080680falsefalsefalseWhy is Dante hot?Why is Dante hot?Palgrave's Revengehttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2002/11/palgraves_revenge.html
<p> Just before World War I, Ezra Pound decided that the best way to teach British readers &quot;How To Read&quot;—to quote the title of his famous essay—would be to assemble a new anthology of English poetry, chosen on Modernist principles. But when he sent his proposal to an agent, he received a &quot;hasty summons. … I found him awed, as if one had killed a cat in the sacristy. Did I know what I had said in my letter? I did. … I had said: 'It is time we had something to replace that doddard Palgrave.' &quot;</p>
<p>The Palgrave Pound had blasphemed against was not just a man but a book, and not just a book but a monument. <em>The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language</em>, edited by Francis Turner Palgrave, first appeared in 1861, and it quickly came to define Victorian taste in poetry. Palgrave sifted 300 years of English verse, from the Elizabethans to the Romantics, for poems that embodied his timeless ideal of lyric poetry: &quot;neither modern nor ancient, but true in all ages, and like the works of Creation, perfect as on the first day.&quot;</p>
<p><em>Palgrave's Golden Treasury</em>, as it came to be known, was as influential as any anthology ever published. It not only decided which poems the literate Briton should know; it embodied a whole conception of poetry that is still a large part of what we mean by &quot;poetic.&quot; Palgrave poetry is sincere, direct, and beautiful; it approximates song rather than speech; it deals with the most sweeping subjects—in particular, love, death, and nature—rather than the merely personal and local. Palgrave poetry is almost never urban, ironic, obscure, or verbally ambiguous. Since these are the very qualities that Pound, along with T.S. Eliot and other Modernist poets, wanted to bring into English verse, it is no wonder that he saw Palgrave as Public Enemy No.1. And the Modernists succeeded, as anyone who reads contemporary poetry can tell. <em>Palgrave's Golden Treasury</em> has become a byword for Victorianism, musty if not positively embarrassing.</p>
<p>That's why it's almost shocking to find that Palgrave is back in print, in a sixth edition that extends it right up to the present day. A 20<sup>th</sup>-century Palgrave, a Palgrave that contains D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and Seamus Heaney, had seemed inconceivable, like putting a helipad on the Tower of London. Palgrave stopped his selections well before his own time, refusing to admit any living poets, even Tennyson, to whom the book was dedicated. But John Press, the editor of the new edition, has covered the last 150 years of British poetry in two new sections, beginning with Walter Savage Landor and ending with Simon Armitage (born in 1963). Still more surprising, he has made the book matter again, showing how Palgrave poetry survived the earthquake of Modernism and continued to thrive up to our own time.</p>
<p>The first four books, Palgrave's original anthology, remain just as they were. On its own terms, it remains a good selection, picking out many of the best lyric poems of the English language. One could get a far worse education in English poetry than by reading Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's &quot;<a href="http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/milton2.html">Lycidas</a>&quot; and &quot;<a href="http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/milton1.html">Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity</a>,&quot; Dryden's &quot;<a href="http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/dryden7.html">A Song for St. Cecilia's Day</a>,&quot; and Wordsworth's &quot;<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww331.html">Intimations of Immortality</a>.&quot; Today, as in 1861, these are keystones of English poetry, and some of the most beautiful poems ever written.</p>
<p>Today, however, no editor would be content with Palgrave's narrow focus on the lyric form. It falsifies our very idea of what poetry can do, as we can see by some of the glaring omissions: not a single song, sonnet, or satire by John Donne; only one meager lyric by Alexander Pope and none of his verse essays or epistles; nothing by William Blake; no passages from glorious long poems like <em>The Faerie Queene</em>, <em>Paradise Lost</em>, <em>The Rape of the Lock</em>, <em>The Prelude</em>, or <em>Don Juan</em>. In his quest for music and feeling, Palgrave ignored the fact that poetry can also be a medium of thought. A major part of the Modernist revolution in poetry was restoring the taste for the 17<sup>th</sup>-century poets, like Donne, Herbert, and Marvell, who are mostly missing from Palgrave. </p>
<p>The real surprise in the new Palgrave, however, is not the gaps in his idea of poetry, which we've come to expect and make allowances for. Instead, it is the continued vitality of what might be called the Palgrave tradition, which is shown to great effect in John Press' extension. Press finds descriptions of nature, meditations on sorrow and death, and love lyrics in the 20<sup>th</sup> century as in the 16<sup>th</sup>. Matthew Arnold's &quot;A Dream&quot; lovingly evokes a rural landscape that we find 50 years later in Edward Thomas' &quot;<a href="http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/tutorials/intro/thomas/head_brass.html">As the Team's Head-Brass</a>,&quot; and another 50 years later in Charles Tomlinson's &quot;The Hesitation.&quot; Even T.S. Eliot—an honorary Englishman—is represented by a seascape like &quot;Marina,&quot; rather than the urban nightmare of &quot;The Waste Land.&quot; The bleakness of Sir Francis Bacon's &quot;Life&quot; reappears, 400 years later, in Philip Larkin's &quot;<a href="http://martinamis.albion.edu/larkina.htm">Aubade</a>.&quot; Modernism comes to seem less like the revolution Pound planned than one of many evolutions in the history of English poetry.</p>
<p>Of course, it would be easy to assemble a different kind of anthology, one that would showcase the massive dislocations of English poetry in the 20<sup>th</sup> century. And Press' selection from living poets seems mediocre, a sign that Palgrave was wise in refusing &quot;to anticipate the verdict of the future on our contemporaries.&quot; But after decades in which the Modernist ideal has held sway—especially in the colleges where most people are introduced to poetry—it is surprising and reassuring to find that Palgrave poetry continues to thrive. If the book has even a fraction of the same authority in the 21<sup>st</sup> century that it enjoyed in the 19<sup>th</sup>, both readers and writers of English poetry will be better off.</p>Thu, 07 Nov 2002 18:03:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2002/11/palgraves_revenge.htmlAdam Kirsch2002-11-07T18:03:00ZArtsPalgrave's revenge.2073557Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2073557falsefalsefalsePalgrave's revenge.Palgrave's revenge.Idol Worshiphttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2002/08/idol_worship.html
<p> Anyone who pays attention to contemporary fiction—especially, but not exclusively, fiction by Jewish writers—knows that the golem is a hot property. Since Cynthia Ozick's <em>The Puttermesser Papers </em> in 1998, golems have found their way into novels of every type—comic and tragic, allegorical and magic-realist. It's possible that this is nothing more than a fad, the literary equivalent of Hollywood's enthusiasm for Kabbalah. But the golem population explosion also suggests that the ancient legend has become a way to explore some very modern problems.</p>
<p>For the uninitiated, the golem is a figure out of Jewish folklore and mysticism—roughly speaking, the Jewish equivalent of the Frankenstein monster. (The most popular sources for golemology are the scholarly essay by Gershom Scholem, &quot;The Idea of the Golem,&quot; and the retelling of the legend by Elie Wiesel, <em>The Golem</em>.) The word &quot;golem&quot; itself comes from Psalm 139, verse 16, in a passage praising God the creator: &quot;My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my <em>unformed substance</em>.&quot; From this humble origin, Jewish tradition constructed a whole theory of golem-making as man's daring and ambiguous imitation of God's creation of humanity. In the <em>Sefer Yetsirah</em>, the third-century book of creation, a Jewish mystic tried to figure out the formulas God used to create Adam, using the alphanumeric codes to which Hebrew lends itself.</p>
<p>But it is in 16<sup>th</sup>-century Prague that we find the classic golem story. In 1580 or thereabouts, Rabbi Judah Loew, known as the Maharal, was said to have created a golem from the mud of the River Vltava. The golem's mission was to protect the Jews of Prague from blood-libel pogroms, to meet the force of anti-Semitism with a counter-force. As Wiesel puts it, the golem was &quot;without pity for the wicked, fierce toward our enemies.&quot; Legend assigns the golem various exploits, thwarting plots and punishing evildoers, but finally Rabbi Loew turned him back into dust. He is said to remain in the attic of the Altneuschul synagogue in Prague, possibly to return, like King Arthur, in time of need.</p>
<p>As even this brief account shows, the golem legend is rich fictional material because there's something in it for everyone. In fact, as Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, &quot;The golem story appears less obsolete today than it seemed 100 years ago.&quot; A look at some of the recent golem fiction shows why. First, there is the scientific element: With the newspapers full of cloning, the idea of humankind creating life is no longer just a myth. The Kabbalistic alphabet code finds a neat analogue in the alphabet of DNA. This facet of the story is best explored in <em>The Procedure</em>, by the Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch, published in English last year. When Mulisch gives us a long list of permutations of God's name—&quot;aBaJ, eBaJ, iBaJ, oBaJ, uBaJ,&quot; and so on—we hear echoes of the ACGT from which all genes are created. Indeed, Mulisch moves from the story of Judah Loew to the tale of a contemporary biologist, Victor Werker, who has created artificial life in the laboratory.</p>
<p>Even more significant is the legend's obvious, but troubling, connection with the Holocaust. If ever the Jews of Central Europe needed a protector, it was in 1939. And in the first wave of post-Holocaust golem fiction—like Elie Wiesel's retelling—this anguished fantasy of rescue took center stage. But the rescue did not come; and recent novelists are more interested in the limits of the golem's protective power. Instead of a figure of strength, the golem becomes a symbol of pathos, as helpless as the Jews of Prague who invented him.</p>
<p> For Thane Rosenbaum in <em>The Golems of Gotham</em>, the golem story embodies the hopeless longing of contemporary Jews to resurrect a past annihilated by the Holocaust. In this magic-realist version, a young girl—the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors—improvises a golem out of mud from the Hudson River. But she botches the formulas and succeeds instead in bringing back the spirits of a group of writers, all Holocaust survivors who later committed suicide—Paul Celan and Jerzy Kosinski among them. Rosenbaum has fun putting these ghosts through their paces and inflicting them, poltergeist-fashion, on contemporary New York City. But at bottom his version of the golem story is a tragic one, emphasizing that the barrier between death and life is uncrossable.</p>
<p> Similarly, for Michael Chabon in <em>The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay</em>, the golem is itself in need of rescue. In an audacious but successful chapter, Chabon has his hero, the Czech Jew Josef Kavalier, smuggle himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague inside a coffin containing the original golem, who is being sent to Lithuania for safekeeping. When Josef comes to America and becomes a comic-book artist, his greatest creation is the Escapist, a hero who can get out of any trap. It is clearly an exercise in wish fulfillment, invented by a man helpless to rescue his actual family from the Holocaust. And Chabon suggests that the golem was the Escapist of medieval Prague; the magic powers that produced the golem have been shrunken, in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, to the comic-book artist's powers of metaphor and imagination. Indeed, Chabon has written a fine essay titled &quot;The Recipe for Life&quot; about how the creation of a golem, with all its attendant dangers, served as a model for his own risky attempt to create life on the page.</p>
<p> Other writers use the golem in equally skeptical ways. In Nomi Eve's <em>The Family Orchard</em>, the legend is part of the coming of age of her young hero Eliezer: His frustrated failure to make a golem is a lesson in disillusionment. Certainly the most ambiguous and provocative treatment of the theme is Cynthia Ozick's. Her golem, named Xanthippe after Socrates' shrewish wife, is created by an idealistic civil servant named Ruth Puttermesser, and it helps get her creator elected Mayor of New York. But the golem's uncontrollable lust—like her gender, a new element of the myth—begins to undo all the good Mayor Puttermesser has done. It is a parable of idealism brought low by earthly nature, the two elements that fuse in human beings but remain at odds in the golem.</p>
<p> Still, we haven't seen the last of fictional golems: This season brings Frances Sherwood's <em>The Book of Splendor</em>, a detailed historical novel about the Prague of Rabbi Judah Loew. But now that there are enough books to fill a golem section at Barnes and Noble, the very popularity of the golem is creating its own set of problems. If the most important thing about the golem, today, is that we no longer believe in it—that it failed when it was needed most—then it can only seem like a literary conceit, not a genuine myth. By making the golem so familiar as a fictional device, novelists might be draining the story of the power that drew them to it in the first place. Even worse is the danger that the golem, like the Hanukkah holiday, is a minor part of Jewish history that is being overinflated simply because it fits in so neatly with modern, American appetites. The golem appeals to us because it reminds us of what we already know—Frankenstein, or genetic engineering, or comic-book heroes. To truly encounter the past means to acknowledge its difference and strangeness, not just its surface familiarity. Maybe the best golem story is still buried in the mud somewhere, waiting for the right novelist to give it life. But it will take some pretty powerful magic to make those clay feet move again.</p>Tue, 06 Aug 2002 15:35:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2002/08/idol_worship.htmlAdam Kirsch2002-08-06T15:35:00ZDoes the world need another golem novel?ArtsDoes the world need another golem novel?2068898Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2068898falsefalsefalseDoes the world need another golem novel?Does the world need another golem novel?Jackie Kennedy's Ridehttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2002/03/jackie_kennedys_ride.html
<p> The staggering success of <em>The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis</em>—it has sold more than half a million copies in the last five months—might well inspire cynicism. It used to be a publishing joke that a book on Lincoln's doctor's dog would be a guaranteed best seller, since Lincoln, dogs, and medicine are perennially popular. Today, one could certainly add all things Kennedy to the list, and there's no doubt that the double dose of Kennedy this book provides (it is edited by Caroline Kennedy) is responsible for much of its popularity. But at a time when a best-selling book of new poetry tops out at around 10,000 copies, there must be something more than just mystique at work here. It looks like there's a much bigger public ready, even eager, for poetry, as long as it is the kind of poetry one might associate with Jackie: that is, romantic, patriotic, traditional, and elegant.</p>
<p>What is most surprising about <em>The Best-Loved Poems </em>is not that it meets all those expectations but that it does so while also assembling a remarkably good group of poems. In fact, this is just the kind of anthology America needs if poetry is ever again to become widely read and loved. The poems found here are almost all rhymed and metered, most are from canonical authors (including a number from Shakespeare and the Bible), and they treat major, accessible themes. Unlike academic anthologies, the book is organized around subjects: &quot;America&quot; first, then poems for children, poems of adventure and escape, love poems, and finally poems of contemplation. All this is designed to make the poems accessible, as Caroline Kennedy writes, to &quot;children ... readers just starting out on their own, and ... those who have never really thought poetry was for them.&quot;</p>
<p>That last group is the overwhelming majority of readers today, and the reason for this alienation from poetry is not far to seek. It is not simply, or even mainly, the &quot;difficulty&quot; of contemporary poetry. (As the poet Randall Jarrell once wrote, people who complain about the difficulty of modern poetry give the impression that they settle down in front of the fire at night with Racine or William Blake.) Rather, it is the loss of poetry reading and recitation in childhood, whether at home or in school. A public that has not memorized traditional poems—classics or even second-rate standards like &quot;Paul Revere's Ride&quot;—cannot be expected to appreciate the gross or subtle rebellions against tradition that define modern poetry. That public needs an authoritative (but nonspecialist) source of poems that are interesting and musical, that can become part of one's mental life.</p>
<p>Jackie is the perfect choice. Not only is she an emblem of sophistication, but her husband's presidency was showily welcoming to the arts—thanks in no small part to her influence. Robert Frost read at John F. Kennedy's inauguration and hailed &quot;a golden age of poetry and power&quot;; at a White House dinner in 1962, with Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, and Arthur Miller in the audience, Kennedy joked that &quot;this is becoming a sort of eating place for artists.&quot; It's not clear exactly how much Jackie Kennedy's tastes figure in the selection—some of the poems were her choices for White House readings, others she read to her children, and still others may simply &quot;reflect things that were important to her,&quot; as Caroline Kennedy says in her introduction. </p>
<p>But the book is convincing as the choice of someone who received a good conventional education in the 1920s and 1930s. There's not much modern poetry here: one poem by Wallace Stevens, one by William Carlos Williams (the inevitable wheelbarrow), some romantic lyrics by W.B. Yeats and E.E. Cummings, nothing by T.S. Eliot. Modern here means the robust balladeers of the 1900s, Rudyard Kipling and John Masefield and Alfred Noyes—old-fashioned now, but in their day a rebellion against the dreamy nature poetry of the Victorians. Masefield's &quot;Cargoes&quot; shows the strengths and limits of this kind of poetry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir<br />Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine<br />With a cargo of ivory,<br />And apes and peacocks,<br />Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is picturesque—and superficial—in a way that might bore a reader looking for depth and subtlety of language. But it has a rousing rhythm, exciting exotic properties, and (in the last stanza) a rather effective piece of social commentary, contrasting these magical ships with the ugly, banal cargoes of 20<sup>th</sup>-century England. What's more, it's the kind of poem that leads beyond itself: It makes an inexperienced reader want to find out about Nineveh and Palestine.</p>
<p>She will need to turn to her Bible, of course, since the Bible was once the common wellspring of poetry. Jackie Kennedy belonged to a generation that no longer read the Bible as literal Scripture but still felt for its rhythms and images a literary reverence; and this book doesn't hesitate to pick out &quot;poems&quot; from the Song of Songs, the Beatitudes, and Corinthians. Shakespeare, too, is extracted: speeches from <em>Richard III</em> and <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> and several sonnets. Reading them piecemeal is not the most authentic way to experience either the Bible or Shakespeare, but it is a necessary introduction: It gives you the flavor and rhythm of the language and urges you to go on to discover more.</p>
<p>Patriotism is a deeply unfashionable subject for poetry today, and for good reason. The poem that Robert Frost wrote for the inauguration, included here, is sanctimonious doggerel. Nor is &quot;America the Beautiful&quot; immortal verse, though it deserves its place as a semi-official document. But Jackie's taste was adventurous enough to include poems that make the idea of America genuine by challenging it: Walt Whitman's &quot;I Hear America Singing&quot; and Langston Hughes's &quot;Let America Be America Again.&quot; Even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's &quot;Paul Revere's Ride&quot; earns its place here: It is one of the few touchstones of American poetry, and it reminds us that verse can be used for narrative as well as reflection. </p>
<p>In fact, the only really dull poems in the book are those in the section for children. It's hard to imagine a child who would not be bored or offended by Robert Louis Stevenson's &quot;The Swing&quot;:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How do you like to go up in a swing,<br />Up in the air so blue?<br />&quot;Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing<br />Ever a child can do!&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The best way for a novice reader to be introduced to poetry is not to write down to his level but to give him enough music, story, and feeling that he'll want to find more, and better, poetry in the future. <em>The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis</em> does just that. If it creates 500,000 readers with taste as good as Jackie's, it will have done a tremendous service.</p>Wed, 20 Mar 2002 17:21:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2002/03/jackie_kennedys_ride.htmlAdam Kirsch2002-03-20T17:21:00ZThe first lady's posthumous poetry blockbuster.ArtsJackie O.'s posthumous poetry blockbuster.2063274Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2063274falsefalsefalseJackie O.'s posthumous poetry blockbuster.Jackie O.'s posthumous poetry blockbuster.Hearing Aidhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2001/12/hearing_aid.html
<p> It's a good bet that, if you've ever bought a book by a living poet, you've been to a poetry reading. Over the last 50 years, readings have become one of the most common ways that poetry is experienced. Poets regularly make the rounds of bookstores and college campuses, increasing sales and getting welcome proof that their audience exists. W.H. Auden even wrote a witty <a href="http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1398">poem</a> about his fans, &quot;On the Circuit&quot;:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><br />God bless the lot of them, although<br />I don't remember which was which;<br />God bless the U.S.A., so large,<br />So friendly, and so rich.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For poets, then, the attraction of the poetry reading is clear. But why has it become so popular with audiences? There is the allure of celebrity, however minor; there is the esprit de corps that solitary readers can feel by meeting the poet (and each other) in person. At bottom, though, is the idea that hearing an author read his or her poem is a more authentic way to experience it.</p>
<p>This idea has been nourished by the unprecedented availability, in the last hundred years, of recordings of poets. The voices of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth can never be heard; but T.S. Eliot reading &quot;The Waste Land&quot; is in any library. It took the technology of the 20<sup>th</sup> century to revive the practice of Homer and the medieval troubadours, whose verses were meant to be chanted to small groups of listeners. And if anyone should object that poetry ought to be read, not heard, those examples always come up. Surely, if it was good enough for Homer, it's good enough for us.</p>
<p>Except that it's not. Recordings by the great 20<sup> th</sup>-century poets are interesting, of course, and have some historical value; but they usually aren't the best ways to experience the poetry, and the growing popularity of the recording is a bad sign. Such thoughts are prompted by <em> <a href="http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnInquiry.asp?sourceid=00013813933139274760&amp;ISBN=1570717206">Poetry Speaks</a></em>, a grand new anthology that, in addition to a large coffee-table book, includes three CDs of recordings by more than 40 poets, from Tennyson to Plath. Let me say right away that <em>Poetry Speaks</em> is a beautifully produced work: Even aside from the CDs, which are the most comprehensive ever assembled as far as I can tell, the book contains introductory essays by dozens of eminent living poets and functions as a fine anthology in its own right. Certainly it will be an object of desire for anyone who loves poetry. But listening to it makes it clear that the voice of the poet holds little key to the poem. </p>
<p>The earliest recordings in the anthology are the most fascinating. It is strange to think that Alfred Tennyson, whose first book was published before Victoria was crowned, lived long enough to chant a few lines into Edison's wax cylinder. Today his reading of &quot;<a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/britpo/tennyson/TenChar.html">The Charge of the Light Brigade</a>&quot; sounds strangely artificial and melodramatic: He almost sings the lines, leaning strongly on the rhythm of the verse. But this is because the poem is already songlike; Tennyson wrote at a time when poets were not embarrassed to sound very different from prose writers. </p>
<p> Some 40 years later, W.B. Yeats keeps to this tradition, trusting the music on the page even when it makes the speaking voice strain, swoop, and catch. <a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/media/2001/12/47_poem_yeatswb_thelakeisle.asf">Listen</a> to the second stanza of his famous poem &quot;<a href="http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1371">The Lake Isle of Innisfree</a>&quot;: The way Yeats recites the line &quot;Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings&quot; is far from the way he, or anyone, would simply say the words; he draws out the vowel sounds in &quot;veils&quot; and &quot;morning&quot; to theatrical length, turning our attention away from the sense of the line and focusing us on the sound. His exquisite ear for verbal music leads him to savor and prolong the lines; we feel that the recording captures the way Yeats said them in his head as he was composing. (And it's amusing to notice that Ezra Pound, who was Yeats' disciple and a great poetic mimic, reads with the same passionate brogue, even though his roots were closer to Boise than Coole Park.)</p>
<p>But the key point is that we can &quot;hear&quot; the poem perfectly well, without ever hearing Yeats read it. The information is all there, on the page; in fact, you could say that the whole skill of reading poetry is knowing how to recreate the music without external help. And the definition of a great musical poet is that he knows how to give you that information. The way Yeats reads &quot;Innisfree&quot; is distinctive, but not authoritative.</p>
<p> Other poets, less musical or simply less skilled as readers, may actually give a bad representation of their own work. John Berryman's recording of his &quot;<a href="http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=963">Dream Song 4</a>&quot; is an example. Berryman sounds self-conscious, mannered: <a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/media/2001/12/54_poem_berrymanj_dreamsong4.asf">Listen</a> to how his voice rises artificially on &quot;on her&quot; and &quot;brilliance.&quot; But there is a bigger problem than the performance. The very form of Berryman's poem resists the Yeatsian chant. The intonations of his written&nbsp;voice are so nervous, the emotional shadings so various and changeable, that the &quot;Dream Songs&quot; might not be speakable at all, no matter who's doing the speaking. The triumph of the poem is that the poet has put more into the lines than he can say.</p>
<p> In fact, one test of poetic value is whether reading aloud exhausts the poem. If the poet's own performance is too perfect—if she seems to get every bit of substance out of the poem—then maybe she didn't put enough in to begin with. With Edna St. Vincent Millay's &quot;<a href="http://www.potw.org/archive/potw6.html">Recuerdo</a>,&quot; her shrill, theatrical reading seems all too appropriate to the shiny plastic lines. It's not just the arch pronunciation of &quot;merry&quot; and &quot;ferry&quot;; notice the fake wide-eyed enthusiasm of Millay's &quot;smelled like a stable.&quot; If a poem needs that kind of purely exterior effect, there's usually something hollow inside. It comes as no surprise, really, to learn from Nancy Milford's recent biography that Millay was a pioneering and very popular reader, on the circuit and on the radio. In this <a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/media/2001/12/73_poem_millaye_recuerdo.asf">recording</a>, the poem is a prop in a show.</p>
<p>In none of these cases does the recording significantly increase the pleasure we get from the poem. Either the poet tells us what we already know, as with Yeats; or, as with Berryman, the poet cuts off some of the poem's possibilities; or, as with Millay, the poet reveals the poem's actual shallowness. And these three cases are representative of almost every recording in <em>Poetry Speaks</em>. (In the Yeats category, I would put Dylan Thomas and, in a different way, Elizabeth Bishop, who read their poems just as we imagine they would. Frost and Stevens go in the Berryman group—a trained actor would probably get much more out of their poems. And Carl Sandburg is of the Millay type—his reading of &quot;The People, Yes&quot; is comically overdone.)</p>
<p>What we really get from recordings is not enlightenment, but something more primitive: a relic of the poet, a glimpse of aura. This is especially true of the oldest extant recordings—Robert Browning's voice, resurrected after so many years, sounds uncanny. But even recordings of poets well within living memory, like Robert Lowell, are cult objects, focuses of devotions for their admirers. And so far they are harmless, like a lock of Keats' hair. </p>
<p>The danger is that, in a time accustomed to passive, mediated &quot;content,&quot; poetry will degenerate from a written to a spoken art, from literature to performance. The poetry reading has already started to affect the way poetry is written, encouraging poets to write simple, conversational, jokey free verse. And for the &quot;audience,&quot; listening to poets, rather than reading poems, prevents a full experience of the complexity, the substance, the music of verse. The poem is always only what the poet wrote down on the page. Everything else is show business.</p>Tue, 04 Dec 2001 20:31:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2001/12/hearing_aid.htmlAdam Kirsch2001-12-04T20:31:00ZSometimes poetry should be seen but not heard.ArtsSometimes poetry should be seen but not heard.2059241Adam KirschCultureboxhttp://www.slate.com/id/2059241falsefalsefalseSometimes poetry should be seen but not heard.Sometimes poetry should be seen but not heard.